


you ain't nothin' but a hound dog (and they called it puppy love)

by Fluffifullness



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Transformation, Dogs, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Eventual Happy Ending, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Non-Canonical Character Death, Sewing, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), Transformation, gratuitous references to 1950s rock and rollers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:27:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 46,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24418855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fluffifullness/pseuds/Fluffifullness
Summary: Okay, Richie, so you’ve just beenShaggy Dog’d, you’re either kicking it in the weirdest of all possible afterlives or you never died and the sewer clown is punking you. What next?(or: Eddie makes it out of Derry, gets a divorce, and adopts a dog.)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 78
Kudos: 318





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my third fill for my [trope bingo card](https://fluffifullness.dreamwidth.org/1032.html). The prompt this time is "Transformations," and since animal transformation is actually a favorite trope of mine in fanworks, I decided to go with that!
> 
> The title is borrowed from two songs - obviously, "Hound Dog" by Elvis Presley, and in parentheses, "Puppy Love" by Paul Anka. (Yeah, I couldn't just pick one.)
> 
> I've got a neat little plan for this fic and expect it to be totally doable in three ~~somewhat long~~ chapters! Of course there will be some angst, but ideally it won't be as heavy as it was in my ghost fic. Gotta make room for dog puns, right?

Getting impaled is a lot like dumping a bucket of ice water over your head. No matter how much forewarning you have – and Richie doesn’t have a lot, frankly – it still comes as a shock that leaves you gasping for air in a temporary vacuum.

And it’s for a good cause, although in all honesty the ice bucket thing was at least fifty percent a PR stunt that Richie only did because his manager suggested it. He can’t even remember if he ever bothered to watch the video they tweeted after the fact.

No one will ever know about  _ this.  _ There won’t be any wooden cookie-cutter funeral pamphlets, and no obituaries, either. Maybe a few stories about his mysterious disappearance, then in five or ten years a made-for-TV true crime doc about the cold case. Steve is gonna be so pissed.

The first thing Richie does after momentarily losing his grip on Eddie’s jacket is check him for wounds. All he has to do is move his hands a few inches in to where Pennywise’s claw is still jutting out from the center of his own body, and even that feels like too much. 

The tip ends just shy of Eddie’s stomach, and that’s what finally makes it a little easier to breathe, punctured lungs notwithstanding. Maybe there’ll be a little tear in his jacket, but Richie figures Eddie can forgive him for that much, at least. 

It’s sort of funny how Eddie sounds the same saying his name whether it’s him or Richie bleeding from a gigantic fucking stab wound.

It throws Richie for a loop, and then of course he  _ literally  _ gets thrown, and when that second burst of pain subsides enough for him to talk, he just sputters some shit about how he can’t believe Eddie could come up with a whole plan like this. He can’t even  _ see.  _

“Did…” He coughs –  _ ow –  _ then tries again. “‘D I lose my glasses?” 

No one answers him, although he’s pretty sure someone – Mike? Ben? – starts looking around for them on the ground, like having them is gonna make any difference in the long run. Richie would tell them not to bother, but he’s too laser-focused on keeping his eyes open and his mind working.

He doesn’t want to let go, is all. It just feels like it would be wrong to. Gotta see this shit through to the end with everyone else – plus it’d be a shame to miss out on the choice clown insults Stan and Eds come up with. Lucky for him, Eddie gets the ball rolling on that without Richie having to say anything, after all.

Eddie helps drag him up to higher ground, too, and it’s Eddie who sticks with him the longest, who slaps his cheeks less and less gently and swears he’ll never forgive him if he doesn’t stay awake.

Richie tries to tell him that’s okay. He tries to come up with something better to say. Supposedly there are dozens of ways to tell someone you love them without actually  _ telling  _ them, but Richie’s in terrible shape to come up with any now.

At least he doesn’t tell him a bad joke. He’d hate for it to flop, for that to be the last thing he ever experiences.

So before he can finish passing out, he combines a promise and a request, and says, “You’ll be okay, Eds.”

One of them has to be.

-*-

When Richie comes to, he knows that time has passed, but he doesn’t know how much or where he spent it.  _ Go figure,  _ he thinks,  _ and after all the theatrics,  _ and then he gets his eyes open and has to try to figure out why he’s sprawled out on the floor of a yellow-and-gray forest. It doesn’t look like any heaven or hell Richie’s ever heard of, and it doesn’t really look like fall come early, either.

Whatever it  _ is,  _ it’s an assault on the rest of his senses. The  _ smell  _ is indescribable. If it were possible to take the stink of the sewer, the Derry woods, car exhaust and a thousand other things Richie can’t even put a name to and then to stuff all of that into an olfactory megaphone, that still wouldn’t sum up half of what this place is like.

There’s also something on his face. A spider? He tries to wipe it off and gets smacked with something furry and deceptively sharp instead.

He swears, or  _ tries  _ to, but all that comes out is an animal yelp.

He tries again and gets something that sounds less pained, at least, but no words. What the fuck, hello, is anyone but me hearing this, why can’t I fucking  _ talk –  _ nothing.

Shaking now, Richie tries to get up. One arm, then the other, but he’s still so close to the ground and his legs aren’t working right. He could be paralyzed, he thinks. Getting stabbed somewhere in the vicinity of the spine could do that to a person. 

Thing is, he doesn’t see anything resembling a person when he tries to inspect the damage. He sees fur the same brown-black color as the thing on his face that hurts when it gets scratched. He sees a tail and legs that scramble for purchase on the leaf-littered forest floor when he tries to move them.

He throws up. 

Standing on four legs is a process; it’s easier, albeit no less panic-inducing, if Richie thinks of it as crawling on hands and knees. His balance is better than it has any right to be, but there’s another problem, on top of the whole “being trapped in the body of a wild  _ fucking  _ animal” thing.

He doesn’t know where he is, and he’s alone. He can see that, now, and hear it and even smell it. Not a person in sight, let alone his friends.

It could be hell. It could be purgatory. Or he’s always had the wrong idea about how reincarnation is supposed to work – but he really hopes not, because this isn’t the body of a newborn  _ anything,  _ and he doesn’t like to think about what might have happened to its previous occupant.

_ Okay, Richie, so you’ve just been  _ Shaggy Dog _ ’d, you’re either kicking it in the weirdest of all possible afterlives or you never died and the sewer clown is punking you. What next? _

What he really wants to do is make a lot of noise, shout until something resembling language comes out, or run until he trips on a rock and flies out of this poor dog’s body like a  _ Ghostbusters  _ ghost ready to go on his merry way. He could stand to haunt almost any building as long as it’s not in fucking Derry. 

Unfortunately, if standing was a process, running is a project, and Richie isn’t anywhere near ready to tackle it yet. By the time he makes it to a road following the… bizarrely crisp sound of one or two passing cars, he’s fairly certain he’s bleeding. It definitely stings like it’s his own body he’s beating up. The soles of his… his paw pads? They hurt the worst, and he can’t even raise them enough to get a good look at them. 

It takes him a while to figure out that the odd whining sound is coming from him; he manages to stop when he focuses on it, but the farther he goes, the more it comes involuntarily with every panting breath. 

The road is familiar. That would probably be better news if it weren’t also a long way from anywhere his friends are likely to be – except maybe the house on Neibolt.

Obviously that’s the last place he wants them to be, and that, maybe more than anything else, is something Richie has to be sure of, so he makes his way there painstakingly slowly, only breaking into something resembling a run when the empty lot comes into view up ahead.

There really is nothing there. It’s just like it was in the Deadlights, but that’s a  _ good  _ thing. It means they did it, and then they all piled into Mike and Stan’s cars, took Bill’s bike and got the hell out of Dodge. If they hadn’t, those things would still be here, too, and there wouldn’t be a scent in the air that makes Richie feel just the slightest bit calmer than he was before.

It could be days since that all went down, except that even Derry’s police might have bothered to put up some yellow tape if that were the case. Probably not a lot more than that –  _ definitely  _ no investigation, of this or any of the other shit that’s happened here inside of a week – but a token effort? Sure.

Richie takes off at a limping trot, figuring he probably looks like a rabid stray but too worn-out and scared to care. He’s not a real dog; he wouldn’t be as easy to catch, if anyone cared to try.

He gets one more lucky break before he runs fresh out of them; even  _ Mike’s _ car is tucked into the parking lot of the Derry Townhouse. Richie’s own rental is still there, too, looking an awful lot less red than he remembers it. His dog vision might be marginally crisper than his human vision sans glasses, but the near-total lack of color is a steep price to pay for it. 

At this point it just feels like getting kicked while he’s down. Even more so when all his howling and scratching at the front door gets him absolutely no response. Just some creaking beds and irritable groaning somewhere upstairs.

The fact that he can hear that at all would be cool if it were an actual superpower and not a symptom of the most fucked up thing that’s ever happened to him – and that’s  _ saying  _ something, considering the events that precipitated this. 

They’re probably all sleeping said events off. Clearly exhaustion translates about as well as pain does in a dog’s body, because after getting help in whatever form the Losers can offer it, all Richie wants is to do the same. 

He doesn’t really  _ mean  _ to, but it’s easier to lie down by the door than it is to stand or sit on busted-up feet, and then it’s easier to rest his eyes and not think about how different the world looks from several feet below his usual vantage point, drained of color and out of focus. 

In his dreams, he’s surrounded by light so blinding that having his eyes closed doesn’t make the slightest difference, like he’s submerged in the sun – and in a detached way it hurts like that, too. Hand him a map of his body, human or not, and he doesn’t think he could point out the source of the pain. It’s just a fact. Something he could be watching instead of feeling – so, like that instinctive flinch when someone gets hurt in a movie.

Richie jerks awake to the sound of feet on stairs. The sound is like thunder, but even after Richie manages to drag himself upright, it takes a few moments for a blurry figure to appear in his line of sight – distorted by the stained glass lining the doorframe, but definitely  _ there. _

If Richie weren’t instantly flooded with pure, unadulterated desperation, he’d feel worse about startling whoever it is with his scratching and barking. Even  _ he  _ hates the sound of it, and he’s the one doing it.

It still has the intended effect; the footsteps get closer and closer until the knob jiggles and the door swings open. Richie can hear every metal piece rasping into place as it goes.

He doesn’t wait for an invitation, instead opting to dart straight through the crack as soon as it’s wide enough to accommodate him. 

He nearly bowls Ben over in the process, and he definitely scares him, if the noise he makes is anything to go by. Christ, Richie can even hear his fucking heartbeat speed up. 

_ It’s okay, it’s just me! It’s Richie! _

The noises he actually makes sound nothing like that, of course, and all Ben says in response is “Jesus” as he takes a hurried step back and raises his arms to defend himself.

“Ben? What’s… oh.”

Beverly is standing halfway down the stairs, eyes wide and fixed right on Richie. The complete lack of recognition there hurts almost as much as whatever’s going on with his feet.

Speaking of which – “It’s okay,” Ben says, voice low and slow. “The blood is all from it.”

_ It? _

“Why’d you let it in?” Beverly is already starting to make her way down toward them again, her eyes fixed on a coat rack on the floor below her. 

“I didn’t, it just ran in when I went to look.”

Richie realizes with a sinking feeling that they think he’s  _ dangerous.  _ He takes a step or two back himself, which is harder than he expects it to be; he stumbles and has to sit to avoid falling while another low whine escapes him. 

_ See? I’m harmless. _

Ben relaxes his posture a bit in response, but Beverly looks anything but convinced. She picks up the unused coat rack the second it’s within arm’s reach, and then she holds it like a battering ram. Richie is forced to pull himself as far out of the way as the narrow entrance will allow to give her space to get between him and Ben.

It would be sort of sweet if it didn’t make him feel so fucking low. 

How do dogs usually show they’re not a threat? He’s too unnerved by the sensation of a fifth limb to do anything about having his tail tucked between his hind legs. He doesn’t know what his new face looks like, let alone how to make it look friendly. 

Beverly gives him a nudge with the tip of the coat rack. All she gets for her trouble is another onslaught of whining, most of it unintentional on Richie’s part. 

_ I’m your fucking friend,  _ he tries to say.

“Hang on,” Ben says, and for a moment Richie honestly  _ hopes.  _ He watches Ben get to his knees very slowly and then extend a hand, palm-up, while Beverly watches, coat rack at the ready. 

Richie takes careful steps toward them, wincing a little every time his paws land back on the floor, until finally he’s close enough to place one of them in Ben’s waiting hand.

That’s what it takes for Beverly to lower her makeshift weapon and kneel alongside Ben. 

“What do you think happened to him?”

_ Fucking killer clown!  _

“Maybe he walked through some broken glass?”

“Or had one thrown at him,” Beverly remarks, tone dropping into something dark and angry. Richie lets her reach out and touch a spot on his left shoulder where the stinging is the worst. He flinches; so does she.

Ben lowers Richie’s paw back to the floor; there’s a darker spot left on his fingers that could be mud, but Richie suspects that if he could see what they can, it would actually be blood-red. 

“Does Derry even  _ have  _ a twenty-four hour veterinary clinic?” 

Beverly purses her lips. “There has to be someone we can call.”

Richie makes another noise, a keening almost-bark that does nothing to convey the idea that they should just ask Mike. He probably knows how to clean a few cuts and scrapes – or better yet, what to do about postmortem shapeshifting.

“What the fuck is that?”

_ Eddie! _

It’s the first time Richie’s felt his tail do anything resembling wagging, but he’s too thrilled about seeing Eddie to spare a glance at it. 

Eddie doesn’t share his enthusiasm, but he looks okay. Kind of droopy, just like Ben and Bev, but okay. Somehow that’s enough to make Richie’s own predicament feel a lot less awful, at least until Eddie wrinkles his nose and says, “Is that blood? That thing could be infected with rabies. Please tell me you didn’t touch it.”

“He’s not hurting anything,” Bev says lightly. “He did give us a scare, though.”

“No fucking shit,” Eddie retorts. Richie totters toward him, but Eddie takes a disproportionate number of steps back up the stairs, despite never having made it past the first flight to begin with. He’s glaring daggers at him, and at the probable blood smear on Ben’s hand.

“Bev,” Ben says, voice lowered placatingly. Richie has no idea if it’s quiet enough to make it hard for Eddie to hear. “What do you want to do?”

Richie turns to look at her, too. They wouldn’t really turn him back out on the street, would they? 

Almost. “We can at least drop him off at a clinic. Or the shelter, if nothing else.”

“That’s…”

_ A fun place to go if you enjoy getting euthanized? _

“Can we get something to eat first?” Eddie says from his bird’s-eye vantage point. “…Or on the way back.”

“You wanna come?”

Eddie fidgets and takes a hesitant step forward. “I’ll drive my own car. Or ride with Stan. I’m pretty sure he won’t want rabid dog blood all over his and Patty’s van, either.”

As if in answer to his comment, another door opens upstairs. Richie can hear other people banging around, finishing up showers and everything else he’d pretty much kill to be able to do, himself.

“He’s awfully polite for a rabid dog, Eddie,” Ben says.

“Hence the barking,” comes Stan’s tired retort. “What’s going on out here?”

Eddie makes a broad, sweeping gesture at the scene down below. “There’s a stray getting blood all over the lobby.”

“Is everyone okay?” Stan sounds alarmed.

“We’re fine. We’re going to take it to a doctor, and they can handle it from there.”

_ I don’t fucking  _ want  _ them to handle it!  _ Richie paws at Ben’s jeans when he stands back up, but all he succeeds in doing is leaving dark smears on the blue denim. Upstairs, Eddie gags under his breath, and Ben sucks in an unhappy breath of his own. 

“Wanna go change?” Beverly offers. “We’ll keep him corralled until everyone’s ready.”

_ ‘Corralled?’ _

_ “‘We?’”  _ Eddie repeats, shaking his head. “I’m not going near that. And you shouldn’t, either.”

“I thought you liked dogs?” Stan asks, giving Eddie a brief pat on the shoulder as he passes him. Ben does the same on his way back up, and Richie goes on watching him until Stanley eclipses his view of the stairs. 

“I’m allergic,” Eddie grumbles. Stan rolls his eyes and squats near Richie. It’s better than having to look  _ way  _ up, even at Beverly. This could totally be Richie’s karmic punishment for making fun of Eddie’s height so much. If it is, whoever’s in charge must have a pretty decent sense of humor.

“He smells pretty bad,” Stan comments. 

Richie comes as close as he can to spitting like an incensed cartoon character.  _ Yeah? Well you guys reek.  _

Which is true, and frankly kind of distracting. The weirdest thing is that they’re all  _ different,  _ every single one of the Losers so far; if he’d had even one of them memorized in advance, making his way here would have been a hundred times easier. 

_ Hey, I could be a detective dog.  _ Sure,  _ Sherlock Hound _ has already been done, but it’s all about reboots these days, anyway. He’s always liked acting, and it’d be the first time that just having human intelligence was enough to earn him a role.

The trouble, clearly, would be pitching the idea to anyone. 

Stanley gives him a more thorough once-over than the other two did, which is one part uncomfortable and one part frustrating. Shouldn’t they at least see a resemblance in the shaggy, black fur? The intelligent glint in his eye? Or how fucking  _ loud  _ he is? And what random stray would be  _ this  _ desperate to get close to one particular group of people in one particular building?

The last thing he expects is for Stanley to infuse his voice with all the authority of a particularly pointed  _ beep beep, Richie,  _ and then for the only words out of his mouth to be, “Lie down.”

Richie stares, offended. Stan stares back, then shrugs and starts to stand back up. “Well, he’s not very well trained.”

Richie growls at him, and just to spite him, lowers himself the rest of the way to the ground. He’s still panting from his long trek over here, or he’d stick his tongue out for good measure.

Beverly laughs. “I think you hurt his feelings.”

Stan frowns down at him. “Okay. Weird.”

_ Yes! I am weird and my feelings are very fucking hurt!  _ Richie hopes a bark will emphasize both points, but mostly it just makes all three of them jump. 

“Can you tell it to shut the fuck up?” Eddie requests. He’s been inching his way toward them, but Richie’s pretty sure he has no intention of coming down from the first landing until it’s time to go.

“Settle down?” Stan tries, a lot less commandingly. Richie barks again anyway; there’s only one “settle down” command he’s ever obeyed, and he’s not about to change that now.

-*-

Derry’s one and only veterinary clinic is swamped.

It’s Saturday-night-in-a-college-town’s-ER swamped, except that Derry is only a college town if you count people who commute to the next town over or come home every summer. Most people don’t come home, so there’s actually a pretty good chance that Derry’s dog and cat population far exceeds its student population, and Richie has the best and worst luck in the entire world.

Best, because the first receptionist Mike talks to when he leads Richie – sans leash, despite Bev and Ben’s concern that he’ll run off the second they open the car door – into the lobby warns him that the wait time could be several hours for injuries as minor as Richie’s. 

“Well, what about tomorrow?” Mike asks. 

“Uh, appointments are – we’re booked clear through the month,” the harried-looking man tells him. The apology sounds like it might have been genuine the first dozen or so times he had to say it. 

“What happened?”

“Wish I knew,” the guy says. “Everyone just decided to stop putting off a trip to the vet, I guess. All at the same time. We’ve even had some strays brought in – like this little guy, I’m guessing?”

“Uh…” Mike glances down at Richie, who whines in lieu of a response. This place is loud, and worse, it’s all distressed whines and yowls and barking. It’s not like they sound like people to him, but they sure as hell don’t sound like they’re having fun, either.

“Our website should have some at-home guidelines for how to take care of little cuts like those,” the man offers. “If you can’t wait. And there’s a shelter just down the”—

“Uh, down the street, yeah. We’ll try that, thanks,” Mike says. “Sorry about… all this.”

He leaves in such a hurry that he probably doesn’t catch the man’s puzzled “It’s not like it’s  _ your _ fault.”

Richie limps along after him and internally curses the  _ worst  _ part of this, which is that he no longer has the advantage of being the only weird dog-related incident to occur in post-Pennywise Derry. 

“Well, we can’t just leave it like that,” Eddie grouches when Mike finishes explaining the situation to the rest of them. “Ugh – hold on. Mike, can you take care of it?”

Without waiting for an answer, he stomps over to his car and throws open the trunk. Richie figures it’s as good a time as any to renew his attempts to win Eddie’s favor, but Eddie gives him a comically wide berth on his way back, and once he’s shoved a bulky white box into Mike’s hands he retreats back to Stan’s side without so much as glancing down at Richie.

Eddie  _ definitely  _ used to like dogs, is the thing, but having one turn into a giant drooling monster right in front of you probably does have a way of making them less cute.

“You keep a first aid kit in a rental car?” Mike wonders when he turns the box around and catches sight of the black cross and blocky “FIRST AID” label on the front of it.

“Just in case,” Eddie mutters. “Like you can’t get hurt in a rental.”

Mike chuckles to himself but doesn’t comment further. Richie is  _ dying  _ to.

Mike leads them back to the library for an old pair of clippers and a clean hand towel, and then he makes impressively fast work of Richie’s assorted scrapes while Eddie paces and complains about how “the whole point of getting that kit out was so we could just go eat.”

Richie minds the fresh bald spots a lot less than he minds Eddie’s irritation with him – and the baby talk Mike uses every time he gets fidgety, which is pretty much the entire time.

His paws are another problem entirely; it’s not that he  _ wants  _ to give Mike a hard time about them, but they  _ hurt,  _ the shit Mike is trying to put on them hurts  _ worse,  _ it feels impossible to stand on three legs, and the amount of manhandling necessary to even get at his hind legs goes beyond what he can put up with on top of everything else.

Eventually, Mike settles for just picking a few particularly big pieces of gravel out of Richie’s front paws, and to hell with the rest of it.

Richie’s seen plenty of dogs lick at wounds like that, so he figures he might as well give it a try while his friends busy themselves discussing where to go for food now that it’s starting to get late.

The licking and biting doesn’t help, but it does earn him a forceful scolding from Stan.

Which he ignores, obviously.

“We should get him some little shoes or something tomorrow,” Mike says. “Kids’ socks would work too, if the pet supply place winds up being busy.”

_ Good luck with that. I’m a men’s size twelve. _

Beverly pauses halfway through filling a bowl with water and, oh, yeah – Richie is  _ definitely _ thirsty. His tail sways of its own accord the closer the bowl gets to his spot on Mike’s blessedly smooth wood floor. 

“Are you planning to adopt him, Mike?”

Richie freezes a few awkward licks in. He’s already managed to get more water on the floor than in his mouth, but give him another minute or five, and he should have the hang of it. 

“Yeah, why bother with all that if we’re just gonna drop it at a shelter anyway?” Eddie wonders. 

_ Jesus, Eds, what did I ever do to you? _

Mike, on the other hand, is watching Richie’s fumbling efforts with a wide smile. “I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.”

“How can”—Eddie stops, shakes his head, and sounds a lot calmer when he instead says, “Can we go get something to eat now? You can get your new best friend a piece of fish or something.”

_ Well, you know what they say about dogs,  _ Richie thinks glumly. Hanging out with Mike wouldn’t be the worst way to pass the dog days of summer, or whatever, but he’s not exactly jazzed about the idea of being anyone’s pet.

Yeah, fuck that – he has a better idea. 

Dip your paw in your water dish, find a dry spot and get the first stroke of a capital ‘H’ down… get your bowl confiscated when you try to go back for more.

_ Fuck! _

“You’re making a mess,” Stan tells him. Richie wishes he were a cat. If he were a cat, he’d be hissing up a storm. And maybe mauling Stan’s stupid retreating legs. 

_ What kind of dog paints pictures with its fucking water?  _

“He really  _ is  _ a weird dog,” Ben comments, like the world’s most useless mind reader.

_ Yeah, I’m fucking weird!  _ Richie barks.  _ You guys just killed a literal space alien! How are you this dense? _

Bill cuts the discussion short before it can even become one, much to Eddie’s apparent relief and Richie’s all-consuming despair. He’s hungry, too, but they have bigger problems to worry about!

But he’ll have a lot more if he inadvertently convinces his only would-be allies that he’s nothing but an unmanageable pest, so he follows as fast as his stubby little dog legs can take him.

Unfortunately, navigating stairs going  _ down  _ turns out to be a lot worse than going up. He keeps slipping, nearly or actually bumping into things – the wall, the floor, and finally Eddie’s legs. It’s mostly Eddie’s fault for trailing behind everyone else, right in front of Richie.

Richie opens his mouth to swear or apologize, but Eddie beats him to the former with the kind of intensity that usually precedes a swift kick to the ribs. The impact never comes, although the anticipation puts a phantom ache in Richie’s chest anyway. When he opens his eyes, Eddie is way up at the head of the pack, and Ben is circling back with his sights set on Richie.

“Let’s see…” He crouches beside Richie on the stairs, one arm extended like a turnstile to keep Richie where he is. He probably thinks he’s being sneaky about reaching behind him to force him off his feet, but Richie isn’t stupid – just clumsy, which is how his plan to slip away before Ben can actually pick him up is thwarted with a triumphant laugh and a “Gotcha.”

Even for the likes of Ben, he’s a real armful; Richie has to put up with some awkward shuffling and a few accidental brushes with his injured hind legs before Ben seems to decide he’s comfortable – which he  _ isn’t,  _ because he didn’t sign up for any extended trust falls and he can drunkenly stumble around just fine on his own,  _ thank you. _

Not that it isn’t nice to be close to his normal height, or at least close to Eddie’s, and of course Ben won’t drop him. If anything, he’s holding him a little too tight.

Richie expects to be let down when they get out to the car, but instead he gets tucked against Ben’s chest while Bev drives.

“You must be a dog-whisperer,” she tells him. “Mike is definitely jealous. Are we gonna have to draw straws to see who gets to take him home?”

_ Buy a guy a drink first…  _

Ben laughs while Richie sulks. “I think Mike gets first dibs.”

Beverly reaches over to scratch behind Richie’s ear. It feels… nice. He leans into it, but she needs both hands to drive,  _ apparently,  _ because the touch vanishes as quickly as it came. Ben makes up for it by stroking along his back.

It’s a weird feeling – makes it really fucking hard to ignore how different he is, covered in fur from head to toe and  _ really  _ starting to miss having opposable thumbs and a human mouth, but it isn’t  _ bad- _ weird. It’s a far cry from bleeding out and waking up alone in the woods.

Richie hardly notices the remainder of the drive to whatever restaurant everyone picked while he was busy trying to get himself out of this mess. He does notice the proud look on Ben’s face when they stop and Bev comes around to help relieve him of his lapdog.

“I think I got him to calm down, at least.”

Richie hops down before Bev can make another grab at him. Too much of that, and he might actually have to hold a grudge. 

“This town’s hard on dogs, too, I guess,” she says, watching him. 

_ It’s a lot harder on people who just look like dogs.  _ But Bev seems to appreciate his yip of enthusiastic agreement, anyway. Just this once, Richie doesn’t mind letting her assume that it’s just a funny coincidence.

The restaurant is a generic, relatively upscale grill that has a patio with enough unoccupied space for three times their group of seven. Richie suspects that’s because it’s verging on too chilly for most people to spring for outdoor seating if they have a choice, but he happens to be wearing a convenient fur coat that’s serving him a lot better now than it did when the sun was still high in the sky. 

It’s the sort of place some of their parents would have gone on the occasional date, which means that if it’s been around that long, Richie would be none the wiser. He’d have a hard enough time recognizing it right now, anyway; he still feels like he has to do a double-take every time he sees Bev and her definitely-not-red hair.

He doesn’t think twice about her asking for a seven-person table until she and Eddie both correct the confused-looking hostess in a flurry of shaken heads and muttered apologies.

“Six – just six.”

_ What, I don’t get to sit?  _

“Sure… Right this way.” The hostess speeds off with a bundle of menus and a plastic smile, leaving their suddenly very quiet group to trail after her in a haze of lowered eyes and bitten lips. 

Richie wishes he could do more than shamble along after them with his own head and tail hung low. He’d throw an arm around Stan’s shoulders, pinch Eddie’s cheeks and call them all assholes for not inviting him. Probably sprawl out across three or four chairs as a penalty for the exclusion and then let Eddie wrestle him off whichever one would be likeliest to send him tumbling to the ground.

All he actually does is circle around the table several times, headbutting unguarded legs and hands and dodging all attempts at petting him. The only reason he stops is the fresh bowl of water their waitress brings out – not because he expects to be able to leave any kind of message on black asphalt in low light, but because he’s thirsty and as Bill so rudely points out, his nose feels dry. Which would be normal under any other circumstances, but as far as Richie knows – pun  _ intended –  _ probably means he’s dehydrated. 

Mike sneaks in some behind-the-ear scratching while Richie’s guard is down. “You know those apps that play high-pitched sounds?”

_ Pretty sure those are just YouTube videos, Mikey.  _

“What – why?” Bill drops his menu to give Mike a bewildered look.

Stan snorts; without looking, Richie knows he’s probably rolling his eyes again. “Pats had trouble with those a few years ago. Kids use it as a prank because adults can’t hear the noise it makes.”

“Huh. What about it, Mike?”

“Well, it’s pretty much the same thing as a dog whistle.” Mike laughs self-consciously; Richie glances up, satisfied that he’s soaked his entire face well enough for the time being. If he’s really lucky, someone might notice how thoroughly he’s managed to empty the bowl and ask for a refill.

But no one is looking at Richie or his bowl; they’re too busy watching Mike try to lighten the mood. “I was just thinking, if Richie were here… he’d probably be using one of those to mess with the dog.”

Richie’s frustrated  _ woof  _ goes ignored in the pensive silence that follows. At least most of them are smiling this time. Kind of tense smiles, but still. Eddie looks like someone just dropped a dead bug on his appetizer plate; he forces a laugh anyway.

“He would’ve done that when we were kids. All the time, if we’d had phones like this.” He brandishes his before setting it back down on the table so fast it’s like someone just yanked the veneer of enthusiasm right off of him.

“Alright,” Beverly says. “So who’s gonna try it?”

“I might not have deleted it back when our staff were trying to figure out what it was,” Mike begins. He starts to tap at his phone screen, but after a moment he stops and meets Richie’s eyes with a slight frown. Richie gives him another  _ woof,  _ this one prompting. He’s curious – so sue him.

“Oh,” Bill interjects with an amused smile. “You want him to like you, huh.”

“You got me,” Mike chuckles. “It doesn’t hurt them, though. We used to use one to call Mr. Chips in from the field. An actual whistle.”

“Back in the  _ good old days…” _

He turns out to be right about the sound not  _ hurting  _ when Bill and Eddie together finally manage to find a way to play it on Bill’s phone, but Richie wouldn’t call it pleasant, either. It’s far from the only thing he’s pretty sure his friends aren’t hearing that he  _ is, _ but it’s louder and more distracting than any of those background noises.

It also puts him at the center of attention with no idea how to use that to his benefit. All he does is disappoint his friends with his non-reaction, at least until Eddie’s frown draws as quiet a howl from him as he can manage. 

Yeesh – there goes what little musical talent he had.

No one is more disappointed than Richie that Eddie is the only one who doesn’t laugh, but the moment passes when the waitress comes back for their orders and they’re all forced to actually look at the menus in front of them.

Eddie makes a surprisingly quick decision, and then when Ben and Mike try to order fish and chips for Richie, he surprises all of them again by intervening. He’s got something pulled up on his phone, probably some quick search he could have had ready since before they all walked in here.

“Actually, can we get a grilled fillet without any seasoning? And,” he hums, still scrolling, “uh, would it have any bones in it?”

The waitress stumbles through an answer that amounts to  _ “probably _ not.” Without batting an eye, Eddie asks her to go make sure. 

“It’s for the dog,” Stan explains, and points. The waitress does a better job than Richie would have of feigning disinterest in him. Or maybe she just feels the same way Eddie does about his dirty fur and generally disreputable air.

Another holdover from his human body, naturally.

“I’ll see what we can do,” she promises before making another swift departure.

_ I’m loving how much you guys look like crazy dog people right now.  _ If Richie could laugh, he would. Fuck having a great poker face, he’d rather poke fun at his friends any day. 

The waitress eventually comes back out to inform them that they can in fact follow Eddie’s incredibly choosy instructions, and when the product of said instructions comes not long after that, Richie finds that he actually enjoys it, two-star presentation aside. It doesn’t taste like much, but that might not have mattered to human Richie, either.

Still, there’s a definite, mouthwatering difference between his meal and the ones on the table overhead.

At this point, Richie knows better than to try his luck with Stan. Mike is certain to be a pushover, and he could probably beg his way to a tasty morsel or two from Bev, Ben – even Bill, except that his stew doesn’t smell  _ quite  _ as worth the effort – but Richie has other plans. 

_ So, Eddie,  _ he thinks as he casually stations himself at his friend’s feet. He half-expects him to recoil again when he places a single polite paw on Eddie’s bouncing knee to get his attention. The bouncing stops, but instead of nudging him away or pushing his chair back in a fit of disgusted rage, Eddie just kind of peers down at him, like he doesn’t know what to do with his uninvited company.

_ Remember Audrey II? Fe-e-e-ed me! _

That would have made him laugh if he’d heard it as one of Richie’s signature impressions and not the sound he actually makes. It’s a little like tires screeching across asphalt.

“That’s some serious begging,” Bev comments, probably noticing Eddie’s not-so-discreet staring and then taking a peek at Richie under the table. He gives her his best approximation of a glare. 

Meanwhile, Eddie starts poking at his plate with a determined frown.

“Green beans?” Bev suggests knowingly. Glare redacted.

“Yeah, but they’re cooked in butter,” Eddie says with a grimace. He looks like he’s regretting that quick decision a little now, but he also looks like he’s grudgingly enjoying his barely-unhealthy vegetables, so, win-lose.

“And it teaches bad habits.” Stan doesn’t even seem particularly invested in the observation. He might as well be reading off a script, like Eddie – like all of them, in between the more genuine bursts of conversation. They’re a working machine with a missing cog, or at least an ill-fitting one. 

“It’s okay if it doesn’t get to be a problem,” Mike disagrees.

“Well, it’s your dog.” Eddie shrugs and spears a single buttery green bean with his fork, only to slip it off and hold it out for Richie, his fingers gripping the farthest end of it like he’s convinced Richie will bite him if he’s not careful.

He does go out of his way to lick him, just to see his full-body shudder and subsequent trip to the men’s room to wash his hands.

-*-

An attempt is made to get Richie to join Bill and Mike in getting dropped off at the library for the night, but he has a new plan and if it means growling over every attempt to dislodge him from the floor of Ben’s car, so be it. He can apologize for hurting Mike’s feelings when he has a mouth that works. 

The second he’s let back inside the Townhouse, he makes a beeline for the door to his room. It takes his friends a maddeningly long time to follow him despite having the advantage of long legs and uninjured feet, but when they see him there they stop – Stan first and then Eddie, Bev and Ben, a four-car pileup at the top of the stairs. 

He barks a few times, not so much trying to make a sentence out of it as he is just trying to make it sound  _ weird,  _ like it could be words, like  _ maybe  _ he’s calling them all idiots to their faces.

Like  _ please don’t any of you leave tomorrow without realizing. _

Beverly brushes past all of them to join Richie in front of the door, only she doesn’t tilt his face back to search it for his likeness and she doesn’t get all shocked and say his name.

She just tries opening the locked door and sighs despondently when she can’t. 

It’s the first time Richie’s seen any of them cry outright. It doesn’t feel as good as he would’ve expected the explicit remembrance to feel; in fact, it  _ feels _ like he just waltzed right into his own funeral only to find that it isn’t the rowdy party he would’ve liked it to be.

The clown is probably rolling in Its grave if It didn’t do this, and if It did… well, fucking touché.

But there’s no way, right? Its magic had to have died with It. Maybe Richie can’t explain this any other way himself, but seven heads are better than one.

Unfortunately, three of those heads are more interested in making a quick getaway than they are in piecing together why he tries so hard to get them to stay. His mouth leaves a fresh wet spot on Ben’s jeans, but Ben just gives him a dismissive pat on the head and turns to unlock the door to his room. Bev follows him in, and Stan only delays his own escape long enough to leave the front doors open just a crack – “In case the dog needs to go out,” he explains when Eddie gives him a disgruntled look.

Of course that bugs him. His bathroom window was shut and locked and Bowers still broke in to stab him in the face. An open door probably looks like an invitation. Might as well also hang a neon “open” sign in the front window.

Maybe that’s why Eddie doesn’t retreat to his own room but instead lingers with Richie in the hallway outside, not sitting or pacing or crying, just standing. Richie tries scratching at his door and whining to get Eddie’s attention, but Eddie goes out of his way not to look. 

When he finally does abandon the hallway and Richie for a little privacy, he makes a similar point of ensuring that his door is locked; Richie can even hear him slide the security chain into place and then tug on it for good measure.

_ Well,  _ Richie thinks, despondent,  _ guess you’ll have a guard dog, too.  _ The floor in front of Eddie’s room is pleasantly cool, but Richie still feels like all that’s missing is the sad violin music and pouring rain to really complete the picture, à la  _ The Fox and the Hound.  _

He doesn’t need a blanket, but he would have liked to be offered one anyway.

Richie falls asleep to the sound of Eddie swearing under his breath in the bathroom, scrubbing viciously at something and periodically running water. Normally his dreams would reflect the things he’s hearing, especially if the things are  _ Eddie,  _ but they’re the same as before – white light, muffled sensation, and silence. 

Forget running slow or not being able to throw a punch – he can’t move at all, and he’s fucking  _ lucid.  _ Isn’t one of the perks of lucid dreaming supposed to be controlling the dream? It’s not even frustrating, or scary or  _ anything.  _ Boring, maybe. So artificially serene that it’s boring. 

Richie’s almost grateful for the metal clatter that finally wakes him up, instantly alert and ready to do his detective-slash-bodyguard dog duty. He hasn’t woken up this fast in a decade at least – file that under “things about being a dog that actually aren’t so bad when you think about it.”

Finding the source of the noise is easy, even after it stops. All he has to do is follow his nose and ears, which take him out the still-open doors and around the side of the building to the back parking lot. 

The lighting back here is sparser, but it’s enough for Richie to make out the stooped figure perched halfway down the fire escape. He feels his fur stand on end for the split second it takes him to recognize faint crying and the scent he’s already starting to associate with Eddie.

Eddie notices him at the same time and gives an impressive start, only to slump back over a second later.

“Just the fucking dog,” he mutters to himself. He tries to shoo him off with one hand, lazily; Richie pretends to interpret it as an invitation to climb up the stairs to Eddie’s side.

“Ugh. I don’t have any food.”

Richie ignores him in favor of finding a comfortable way to lie down on the same step as him, only an inch or two away from his left hand.

_ Oh,  _ he notices.  _ Did you lose your wedding ring in the cistern? _

Eddie, of course, doesn’t answer him, although he keeps sneaking perplexed glances at Richie out of the corner of his eye. 

Hey, at least it means he stops crying. Mission accomplished, sort of. 

Richie raises his head from his paws abruptly when Eddie’s hand comes down on the space between his ears; they perk up without him even having to think about it, and Eddie withdraws in a flash. 

“Allergic to dogs,” he says, voice dripping sarcasm. “Right.”

_ Well don’t let me stop you,  _ Richie thinks. He prods at Eddie’s hand with the tip of his snout and gives him a long, expectant look when Eddie frowns at him.

With cautious fingers, Eddie slips his hand into the long, tangled fur behind Richie’s ears. His attempts at detangling it pull a little, but he’s clearly trying to be gentle, so Richie holds still for him on purpose and wags his tail accidentally. 

It’s the first smile Richie’s seen from Eddie all day, and incidentally, it just might be a high point for him. 

“That’s a good boy.” Richie rolls onto his back, the better to maybe score some chin scratches, but instead Eddie laughs and rubs at his belly. In another life, that combined with the things Eddie coos at him would have been the death of Richie all over again, but in this one, he’s just a stray dog trying to comfort his best friend in the wee hours of the morning.

When Eddie finally decides he’s had enough of that, Richie decides to push his luck just a little bit further. He’s not cold, but Eddie looks like he could use a little doggy heating pad, so he crawls halfway onto his lap and waits for Eddie to shove him off.

He doesn’t, although he does wrinkle his nose a little and touch Richie only very gingerly, like he didn’t  _ just  _ have his hands buried in his fur. 

A moment passes. Eddie lifts his legs as if he’s getting up, an attempt to get Richie to dislodge himself willingly.

He does, albeit only with a plaintive sigh.

He also follows Eddie up the stairs without any prompting, which makes it sort of funny when Eddie turns to call him but only gets as far as “c’m…” as he slowly drops his gaze to meet Richie’s.

“Still don’t have any food.”

_ You didn’t pack a single emergency can of dog food in those massive suitcases of yours? Calling bullshit, dude. _

It’s a late night full of surprises, though, because he  _ did  _ pack a second emergency first aid kit – probably the very thing they raided when they needed to patch up his cheek, considering how close to the top of Eddie’s largest suitcase it’s sitting when he lets Richie trail into the room after him.

(Not so much “lets,” really, as holds the door open and stares until Richie hesitantly limps past him.)

And he also packed a hypoallergenic shampoo, which is probably just what Eddie uses on the regular. The label says it’s unscented, but Richie begs to differ.

He has a feeling he knows where this is going even before Eddie goes to turn on the faucet in his curtainless bathtub, but that’s definitely the nail in the coffin. The only reason Richie doesn’t turn tail and run is the concentrated way Eddie pulls out his phone to read while the tub is filling. He lets Richie cautiously approach until he’s close enough to more or less read what’s on the screen – stuff like “lukewarm water,” “air-dry” and a picture of a much bigger dog than Richie seemingly enjoying its bath.

_ Yeah, not happening,  _ Richie thinks, unless Eddie is planning to drizzle a generous helping of that soap into the tub and just leave him to it. He hopes his short growl more or less expresses the idea that he’ll definitely wind up regretting it when he finds out just who, exactly, he’s planning to bathe.

Or  _ if.  _

Oblivious, Eddie loops an arm around him, a loose sort of head-lock. “Are you gonna cooperate with me?”

Richie growls again and shakes his head side-to-side, like he’s already soaked to the bone and trying to get himself dry. It just makes Eddie laugh, but at least he lets go.

Richie can appreciate his apparent unwillingness to actually  _ force  _ Richie into the tub, but unfortunately for him, Richie is just as unwilling to hop in of his own accord.

Unfortunately for  _ Richie, _ the asshole trying to goad him into a bath also happens to be his number one weakness. What is he supposed to do – see Eddie’s face fall after so much failed hand-waving and pleading and  _ not  _ cheer him up by attempting a frankly terrifying leap right into the center of a bunch of water?

He accomplishes it without adding any more bruises to his collection, and he gets the added satisfaction of splashing Eddie and the floor with a generous portion of the bathwater. 

Like he’s gonna make it  _ easy.  _

“Asshole,” Eddie hisses when he’s done spluttering and batting water out of his eyes like an enraged cat. They make a fine pair, Richie thinks, and he barks:  _ Yeah, I am, aren’t I? _

While Richie tries to get used to the feeling of water soaking through a whole lot of fur, Eddie makes a careful grab for the shampoo bottle and squeezes some into his palm. 

“No more splashing,” he warns in a tone so soothing it’s uncanny. He could be an actor, too, if he wanted.

_ No promises,  _ Richie yaps back. For reasons unknown, that seems to amuse  _ and  _ encourage Eddie, who finally stops hanging back like he expects Richie to leap right back out and/or attack him.

It’s not as bad as it could be. The water is warm, Eddie is gentle despite being a little too thorough, and getting clean makes Richie feel ten percent closer to being a person. Plus, being told that it’s okay, he’s okay, he’s doing good, etc. in the same baby voice Mike used with him earlier has exactly the effect it’s supposed to this time around.  _ Nothing _ is okay, but it doesn’t hurt having Eddie there to reassure him, anyway.

He’s also better about walking Richie through the whole process. Now this, now that, close your eyes… No real dog would understand a word of it, but Richie finds himself following every instruction. If he’s lucky, maybe Eddie will wise up to how unlikely that is. If he’s not, he’ll still have won Eddie over one way or another, and he’d rather have that than angry looks and constant avoidance.

The final rinse leaves Richie shivering and kind of spindly-looking. Eddie snorts and wraps a towel around him.

“You’re, like, sixty percent fur.”

_ And a hundred percent over this,  _ Richie thinks. He lets Eddie towel him off a little before he decides to shake himself off instead, spraying water as far as the mirror on the wall and the still-open, broken remnants of the window. There’s another towel sitting on the floor beneath it, probably the leftovers of an unsuccessful attempt at covering it up. 

Eddie swears and laughs and holds the soggy towel up like a shield, but his rolled-up sleeves and the whole front of his shirt are already soaked. 

It’s like those videos Richie’s seen online, the ones where people hold up blankets and then step out of sight of their dogs so it looks like they’ve disappeared, except the only thing that’s gone when Eddie lowers the towel is his smile. 

“What happened to you, huh? You don’t really look like a stray… at least not now,” he adds with a hint of pride. Richie would preen under the spotlight of that attention, but this isn’t an opportunity he can miss.

_ Pretend this has a nasty spike on the end of it,  _ Richie thinks, raising one paw to poke at Eddie’s chest.

Eddie looks surprised, and for a minute Richie’s tail wags –  _ Yes, fucking finally! –  _ but then Eddie lifts the first-aid kit off the toilet and holds a hand out for Richie’s paw.

“Shake?”

_ No, Eds – fuck, come on, that was obvious, wasn’t it? I was answering your question! _

He whines at Eddie while Eddie digs a pair of tweezers from the kit and then gently lifts Richie’s paw  _ for  _ him. 

He whines  _ more  _ when Eddie pulls a splinter or several from the pads.

“Weird you were walking at all,” he says, wincing in sympathy as he inspects the damage. 

_ If one more person calls me weird without doing anything about it— _

“Okay,” Eddie says after applying something to Richie’s right paw. He keeps holding it while he tries unsuccessfully to dig a roll of bandages out of the kit one-handed; Richie does the  _ suspiciously  _ helpful thing and lifts his paw from the palm of Eddie’s hand, holding it in midair while Eddie blinks at him.

“Uh… thank you.”

Richie snorts at him. Eddie shrugs it off,  _ again,  _ and busies himself wrapping the paw in a few layers of bandages.

He does the same to all of Richie’s paws – even the back ones, because Richie is a gigantic pushover and he has _ no  _ idea how hard walking on four bandaged feet is going to be until he’s forced to actually do it.

He’s seen videos of dogs walking in shoes, too. They’re the kind of funny that makes you feel a little bad for laughing. Richie always laughs anyway, so _this_ could _definitely_ be karmic justice. It’s less embarrassing than it could be, at least – like doing something stupid in a full-body costume; Eddie isn’t laughing at _him,_ and he’s laughing, and that’s good.

But Richie was already achy before he had to take a lap around the bathroom feeling like he’s walking on two pairs of ice skates. Lifting his feet too high and spreading them too far in a bastardized version of a runway walk.

He’d play it up if he weren’t so sick of it –  _ just  _ when he’d been getting the hang of getting around. Instead he just plops down on the floor and closes his eyes.

Apparently Eddie feels bad for laughing, too, because a second later there’s a hand playing with one of Richie’s drooping ears, trying to get it to stick upright again. 

“It’s not so bad,” Eddie tells him. “I had to wear a cast when I was a kid, and I got used to it.”

_ That was just a handicap to make your fights fairer,  _ Richie grouses.

“Richie…”

Richie’s head  _ and  _ ears perk up at the mention of his name. Eddie startles over it, then seems to change his mind about whatever he’d been about to say.

“Richie would’ve let you sleep with him,” he says instead, “but I’m not leaving that door unlocked and I’m not getting woken up in the middle of the night to let you out, so… out.”

He gestures at the door with a semi-stern look on his face that quickly gives way to a softer one when Richie goes all droopy again.

“Here, we’ll make you a bed in the hall.” 

And he does, using a handful of sort-of clean, slightly-damp towels to build a tidy-looking nest farther away from the stairs. Richie hobbles his way over to his own door, the better to look and feel properly pathetic again.

Eddie takes a step back to inspect his work – both Richie and the towels – and after giving them both an adorable little nod of approval, he disappears back into his room, hopefully to finally get some fucking sleep.

Richie waits to hear the bed squeak under his weight, and then for his breathing to even out. Then he spends several minutes painstakingly tugging his makeshift bed back down the hall to lie directly in front of Eddie’s door.

-*-

_ You’re supposed to let sleeping dogs lie,  _ Richie thinks blearily upon being woken up by Stanley emerging into the hallway. He has his phone pressed to his ear; Richie can hear it ringing as if it were on speaker. 

Stan stops when he sees him, does a double take and then crouches to pet him with an amused smile that becomes almost sunny when a woman’s voice greets him warmly on the other end of the line. 

“Hey, Pats.”

Richie watches him disappear down the stairs and then out the front door, listening without really meaning to until it becomes easier to tune their conversation out.

Bev and Ben aren’t far behind him, and they’re just as tickled by Richie’s choice of sleeping accommodations. 

“Looks like someone got the full spa treatment.”

_ Yeah, I guess I owe him one,  _ Richie thinks with a stretch and a yawn. Maybe he’ll treat Eddie and his wife to a couples massage or something, whenever he’s capable of reserving them one. It’ll be half apology, half thank you, and all Richie will have to do is not dwell too much on the mental image of them relaxing together.

Ben and Bev spend a minute debating whether they should risk waking Eddie up by knocking. If it were up to Richie, they’d let the poor guy sleep in, but even letting his displeasure be known via a long warning growl doesn’t stop them from finally rapping at the door.

Behind it, Eddie swears up a storm, practically falls out of bed and twists the door open like it personally wronged him.

“Shit, is everyone else ready to go?”

“You’ve got time,” Ben reassures him just as Eddie takes notice of the furry roadblock in front of him.

“Uh, did one of you guys move him here?”

“Hm?”

“Nothing… Never mind. Just give me a minute to get cleaned up.”

In the interim, Ben and Bev join Stan downstairs while Richie inadvertently knocks over the glass of water Ben brings him to drink. Eddie comes out to find him awkwardly trying to push the towels over the mess using his thumbless, bandaged paws. It’s about as effective as prodding at them with a stick; Eddie manages to soak up the spill in a few seconds while Richie amps up his frustration trying and mostly failing to walk it off.

_ Show-off. _

Eddie kicks the refuse of the towel bed back into his room, locks the door and then gets down on one knee again to hold his arms out to Richie.

“C’mere,” he says.

Richie glances between him and the stairs, then down at his useless feet. When he looks back up, Eddie is smiling enough to crinkle the corners of his eyes. 

“Come on, it’s okay. I probably won’t drop you.”

_ If you do, I reserve the right to chew on your ankles.  _ Swallowing what’s left of his pride, Richie wobbles up to him and nearly manages to contain his surprised yelp when he gets scooped up upside-down, legs bicycling in open air and only narrowly avoiding batting Eddie in the face.

Eddie shushes him while he tries to find a better position, which winds up meaning that he supports Richie’s lower half while Richie drapes his paws over his left shoulder. Richie only wishes he were resting his chin on Eddie’s shoulder under different circumstances.

He also wishes he could see his friends, who for some reason pretend not to notice Eddie’s armful of dog when they reach the bottom landing.

-*-

If an animal – any animal – led you to an old carving on an old bridge at the end of a little-traveled road in your hometown; and  _ if  _ that carving happened to be the initials of two of your closest friends, one of whom just supposedly died under mysterious, possibly magical circumstances; and  _ if  _ that animal had already made several fruitless attempts at conveying similar messages to you over the course of nearly twenty-four maddening hours… wouldn’t that be a dead giveaway that your stray dog friend was actually your dead comedian friend experiencing what he dearly wishes were actually the worst day of his life?

Richie thinks so. 

Those are the pros: super obvious and maybe Richie’s best bet now in the dwindling time he has left to make a move that sticks.

The cons: he’d be lucky to make it halfway there on his own two…  _ four  _ feet, which isn’t gonna cut it considering he can’t just give them all directions for a quick and painless drive.

Other cons include the real possibility that the stupid carving isn’t even there anymore; after all, making it in the first place was less about the permanence of the final product and more about the act itself.

The deal-breaker: if it  _ is  _ still there, this whole plan hinges on letting all six of Richie’s nearest and dearest friends – Eddie included – see it. 

It’s a secret he was basically ready to take to his grave, and that’s a double-revelation he doesn’t want to happen as long as he doesn’t have a mouth to defend himself with. Or any way to run off if the going gets  _ really  _ tough.

It’s already tough, though, so there’s that. Breakfast feels like a badly-written soap opera wherein each one of Richie’s friends cries or almost cries one or two at a time until  _ finally  _ Stan exchanges a look with Bill, who bumps knees with Mike under the table. Mike exchanges a look with Bev, who nods. Ben sneaks a glance at Eddie, who’s too busy scowling down at his phone while it vibrates noisily in his hands to notice any of this.

Richie’s settled in beside him, right where he’d be if he were a human, just… a little lower, sprawled beside a licked-clean can of wet dog food and a pair of grocery bags stuffed with things he fervently hopes no one will actually need.

Among other things, that includes toys he has no interest in, shampoo that’s actually  _ intended  _ for dogs, a portable water dish, brushes, and, worst of all, a leash and collar. Richie will have plenty to say about how kinky that is when his friends can be suitably embarrassed by it, but in the meantime, no amount of cajoling is gonna get them any closer to slipping any collar or harness around  _ his  _ neck, no sir.

The dog food, on the other hand, is hardly even a low for him; if he could have stomached it in his twenties when he was too busy trying to pay his bills to care what he ate, he probably would have, albeit maybe with the benefit of a fork and table.

“So, Eddie.”

In his periphery, Richie sees Eddie look up in unison with him, his expression tight. “Yeah?”

Beverly gestures at Richie with her fork. “You made friends after all.”

Eddie lowers his phone to his lap. Interestingly, he makes fleeting eye contact with Mike before he says, “I just cleaned him up.”

Mike shrugs. “You must have done  _ something  _ right to get him to sit still for you.”

Okay, so that makes Richie feel a little guilty. It’s not Mike’s fault he has an especially soft spot for Eddie; he’s probably great with actual dogs.

Before Eddie can respond, Ben jumps in to add, “Yeah, and he didn’t like being carried by me very much.”

“That was just”—

“Have you named him?” Bill wonders.

_ Ooh,  _ Richie thinks.  _ Better make it good, Eds. _

“For all we know, he already has a name,” Stan points out, but even he looks curious.

“Name your own damn dog,” Eddie mutters, looking pointedly at Mike.

Mike turns his palms skyward and shrugs. “I’ve been thinking, I’ll be doing a lot of travelling. Bill would be looking after him for so long he’d practically be  _ Bill’s  _ dog, so…”

Eddie’s brow creases. “So what? So you’re not gonna take him?” He glances down at Richie, who tilts his head in response. “You want  _ me  _ to…?”

“Only if you want,” Mike says. “Obviously I’d love to, but – uh, he likes you?”

_ So much,  _ Richie thinks. 

“I don’t even know where I’ll be living in a week.”

What? Surely at home with his beautiful, some-people-get-all-the-luck wife, or did Richie miss something while he was hauling his mangy ass in from the woods?

“That’s why there’s no pressure,” Beverly hurries to say. There’s the slightest wince lining her words. 

Eddie looks around incredulously. “Are you all in on this? Seriously?”

_ Do I get a say in this?  _

Neither of them gets an answer beyond a chorus of shrugs and smiles buried behind raised glasses and fingers. Eddie scoffs. Richie stares at him, more surprised by the lack of an immediate refusal than he is by his newfound status as a consolation prize.

“I’ve never had any pets,” he finally says. “I wouldn’t know what to do with him.”

“We can take him off your hands if it doesn’t work out,” Ben offers. He  _ looks  _ like he’s blushing, but Richie doubts he could see that even if he were lobster-red. He can still see how Ben flounders over the obvious, unintentional implication that he’s planning to be with Bev in New York for some unspecified period of time, divorce pending.

Holy shit, is that what’s going on with Eddie, too?

Eddie sighs. “Great, so Bev gets you and I get this random dog we found on the street.” Speaking of dog names: bingo. Richie hates that he wasn’t around to hear Eddie say this the first time. He’s proud of him, and fuck – he’ll have to rethink that whole spa getaway plan.

Or maybe not; given approximately  _ everything  _ Richie knows about divorce, Eddie might need a massage or two in the coming months. 

Richie would give almost anything to know for sure he’ll be around –  _ really  _ around – to set him up with some.

“That sounds like a yes to me,” Bill says with a grin.

“It’s a  _ maybe,”  _ Eddie emphasizes, and then he laughs on an exhale. “If I wasn’t already trying to get a divorce, I think showing up with a ratty-looking dog would’ve done the trick anyway.”

_ On behalf of dogs everywhere, fuck you.  _

Unimpeded by Richie’s lingering disgruntlement, the conversation turns toward other topics, most of them job- and travel-related. Richie isn’t the only one in plenty of professional trouble, but he is the only one who won’t be making any apologetic phone calls or boarding any flights home any time soon if things keep going the way they’re going. 

Even when he’s speaking or being spoken to, Eddie continues to throw increasingly contemplative looks Richie’s way. If Richie were feeling optimistic, he wouldn’t have to try so hard to convince himself that that’s the expression of a man who suspects his dog-to-be may actually be a balding forty year old comedian.

Apropos of nothing, Eddie sets his phone down with a decisive  _ thwap  _ and says, “I do have an idea.”

Bill stops short of making a “go on” gesture.

“I like ‘Buddy.’”

_ Vetoed, if it doesn’t have at least six syllables I won’t answer to it.  _ Or just two, Ri-chie, Trash-mouth, but not a depressingly generic “top dog names” list result.  _ ‘Hey, this is the name we came up with for the family pet. It hates their suspiciously inexpensive new house and dies under mysterious circumstances within a week!’ Ugh. _

“Remember how Richie – you know how he had that thing about Buddy Holly in high school?”

Jesus. His thing about Buddy Holly was a legit  _ thing  _ that came from a weird place, half “wish I could borrow some of that charm, because objectively he’s charming and everyone agrees with me on this,” half “he looks a  _ little  _ like my equally unattainable real-life crush,” and the fact that Eddie can’t possibly know that doesn’t make bringing it up any less unfair when Richie can’t diffuse the comment with an impression.

It’s a sneak attack, frankly, like Eddie’s earnest eyes and the flurry of replies – Beverly’s delighted  _ “Seriously?”  _ and Stan’s fond “Who could forget?” and Mike’s “Yeah, he only made us listen to that ‘best of’ tape about a million times,” like Richie didn’t subject them to a whole chaotic  _ range _ of artists and genres in their pre-college years.

Eddie smiles along with them, but it’s subdued. Finally, he says, “You think he’d mind?”

Richie noses at his thigh, the closest bit of Eddie he can still reach, but Eddie doesn’t look at him. Even if he had, and even if Richie could actually answer him, he wouldn’t know what to say. Does he mind? He wishes they weren’t having this conversation at all. He’ll be dwelling on Eddie dwelling on old memories of him for days, weeks, months after it stops being relevant. He’d tell him how cute the idea is if he could.

“No,” Bev laughs. No, he doesn’t have a monopoly on the name of a popular 1950s rock-and-roller he just happened to like a very normal amount when he was a teenager.

“He’d think it was funny,” Bill says.

“Am I the only one who can just hear him going  _ ‘cute cute cute’  _ over this idea?”

_ Woof woof woof –  _ no response, not even a bemused frown. Stan shushes him.

“It’s a cute name,” Mike decides.

“It’s better than naming him Richie outright,” Ben offers. Eddie looks mortified, Ben and Mike and Bill all nod or wince or both, and Beverly kind of shrugs.

“He might have thought  _ that _ was funny, too.”

_ Actually he hates all of you a little. _

Like, okay, this  _ is  _ funny, but only in a cosmic punishment sort of way. Richie wishes he had fists so he could punch a wall or maybe tear his fur out in chunks. This is a fucking farce. And he’s a  _ dog. _ And when his low growling prompts Eddie to reach down and ruffle his fur the way Richie might’ve done to  _ him,  _ his stupid dog body betrays him in an instant: perky ears, wagging tail, the whole nine.

Fuck, he  _ loves  _ this guy. Enough to die for him, no questions asked. Enough to let him call him whatever the hell he wants and get away with it.

Enough to make a reluctant decision.

It doesn’t make sense for a bunch of reasons, one of which is that Eddie is only tied with Stan for “most likely to freak out over the gradual realization that this dog is – to put it sinisterly – _not what it appears to be,”_ but what’s Richie supposed to do? Make a big snarling show of suddenly disliking his best friend in favor of his best bet?

Mike would probably feel just as guilty about it if he did, and Richie doesn’t love the idea of playing third wheel to Ben and Bev.

So, yeah: worst case, he’ll let Eddie be the one who gets him out of Derry.

-*-

Because it never rains but it pours, Richie has an albatross around his neck, can’t catch a break, and, most importantly, is literally  _ dogged  _ by misfortune, the worst case happens. Even making a huge show of trying to retrieve his phone from Eddie doesn’t raise any important,  _ incredibly  _ obvious questions. It just gets him taunted with a chew toy he only bats at because he wants it out of his fucking face.

Which apparently is cute because it’s cat-like, and he “doesn’t know how to be a dog,” and what the fuck,  _ yes,  _ that’s the  _ point. _

They all spend so much time lingering together in the living room and around the bar downstairs that Bill comes dangerously close to missing his flight. He seems less worried about that than Eddie, who paces more and more the later it gets. 

Richie figures that’s because among the Losers who still have opposable thumbs, Bill’s probably the one in the deepest shit at work. Which Richie only knows because Bill keeps playing it down a little  _ too  _ much.

Apparently Eddie isn’t  _ just  _ worried on Bill’s behalf, though, because the first thing he says after their first round of goodbyes is concluded and Bill’s car is a metaphorical speck on the horizon is, “Mike, do you think we’ll remember this time?”

_ You have to,  _ Richie barks.  _ Because what the fuck am I supposed to do if you don’t?  _ What would that even mean for him, leaving Derry but staying trapped in the body of the wrong species, and then forgetting? Forgetting  _ what?  _ Will his entire mind go up in a puff of smoke the second they cross the county line?

What about Ben and Bev, and Mike’s plans to visit Bill when he’s had enough of Florida? What about everyone’s memories of him?

“I guess we’ll find out,” Mike says ominously. 

Beverly seems to notice something about Eddie’s reaction – but not Richie’s, because of course no one notices the dog trembling at their feet despite the bright sunlight and hot asphalt. “If Bill actually calls us from the airport, that’s gotta be a good sign, right?”

_ Yeah, but by then Eddie might have already left with me and— _

“Even if he does – before you leave, too,” Eddie says to Mike. “When you’re all packed, before you go, can you call me again?”

“We’ll all call you, Eddie,” Ben promises.

“No one wants to forget Richie,” Stan says, voice low. “So we’ll  _ all _ make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Even if we have to keep a constant game of phone tag going,” Beverly agrees.

“Sounds like the kinda thing Richie’d want.”

_ Why, ‘cause it’d be annoying? _

Richie doesn’t see the tears well up in Eddie’s eyes, but he can hear the giveaway hitch and quiver in his voice. “Ask me about him. If – when you call. Just to make sure.”

“I will.”

“Yeah, Eddie, if you think it’ll help…”

Richie always sort of assumed dogs could cry if they got sad enough. His throat makes the most pathetically high-pitched whining sound he’s heard from himself yet, but if hearing Eddie talk like his memories of Richie are the last thread he’s hanging on by isn’t enough to put tears in his big, colorblind eyes, then nothing’s ever gonna be. 

He paws gently at Eddie’s leg, grateful for the first time that his claws are hidden behind a few layers of gauze. 

_ Hey,  _ he wishes he could say,  _ I’m here. I’m right here. _

_ Gee, Eds, your face is almost longer than mine! _

Eddie doesn’t smile until they’re at eye level, almost, and then there’s just the barest hint of one. 

“Accidentally freaked Buddy out, huh?” He combs a hand down Richie’s back, along his spine. Richie focuses on that and on keeping his tail still – just to see if he  _ can,  _ so maybe the involuntary shivering will stop before Eddie gets too worried about it. 

He must notice it, anyway, because he does the same thing he did with Richie’s ears, holding him gently but firmly in place and smoothing his unruly fur down, like if he just concentrates hard enough he’ll be able to mold Richie into a calmer shape. 

For what it’s worth, Richie feels like warm clay in Eddie’s hands.

“You’ll,” Eddie says, and then he stops with a sharp, short little gasp like that first painful breath when you step outside in the dead of winter. Richie watches as a single tear finally escapes Eddie’s left eye and soaks into the gauze pad on his cheek.

“You’ll be okay.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reader beware, you're in for a cliffhanger chapter ending - but don't worry, I've already started in on the third and final chapter!
> 
> Also, a more serious **content warning** for brief but intense internalized homophobia. 
> 
> Thanks for being so patient between chapters! Chapter three will obviously be a bit shorter (and much of it is that good stuff that practically writes itself), so I anticipate it coming faster!

New York is Richie’s new least favorite state.

At least in Derry, no one would have cared if some guy wanted to adopt a dog and  _ not  _ take it to the vet for the full gamut of shots, tests and a follow-up operation for which he still hasn’t  _ fully  _ forgiven Eddie.

“I think he hates me.”

Richie has spent the last several minutes listening to Eddie pace his way through three separate phone calls, but he stopped relishing Eddie’s contrition over the whole neutering thing like three days ago, so when he hears  _ that _ he gets up with a ginger stretch and pads over to plant himself right in Eddie’s path.

_ You’re gonna wear a trench in the floor,  _ he thinks, yawning,  _ and we’ve only been here a week. _

Beverly’s laugh filters through the phone speaker, clear as day. “Have you tried bribing him with treats?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, eyeing Richie with a lingering wariness. Really, if Richie was gonna kill him in his sleep he definitely would have done it already. He has a  _ motive.  _ “But he’s been acting weird all week. He doesn’t even want to go for walks.”

“Did you”—?

“Obviously I took him back to the vet. She said he’s fine, and he still  _ eats…” _

“He’s gonna get fat,” Beverly teases.

“It’s not funny! I’m really bad at this!”

Richie paws at Eddie’s pant leg, the universal dog sign for  _ Get down here and give me attention.  _

_ You’re not bad at this,  _ Richie thinks when Eddie obliges him by lowering himself all the way to the ground to sit cross-legged across from Richie. It’s easier thinking it than saying it, although for the most part every passing day leaves Richie that much closer to exploding for lack of being able to say any of the shit that pops into his head. 

He’s keeping a running mental list of jokes and puns that he has every intention of sharing if he ever gets the chance – and fuck if that isn’t already starting to feel like a pretty big “if.”

“You’re following state laws,” Beverly reminds him gently. “And now you don’t have to worry about Buddy going rabid on you.”

“That’s a plus,” Eddie mutters. 

_ You’re so cute. I’d still consider leaving a dead bird in your bed if I could sneak it in here. _

“Is that him I hear?”

Eddie cracks a little smile and scratches behind Richie’s ears. “Yeah. He likes to talk.”

_ Do I ever.  _

In Richie’s humble opinion, though, he’s been doing an admirable job of keeping the “talking” to a minimum. Eddie had to fight hard enough to get the landlord to make an exception to his arbitrary “small dogs and cats only” rule without Richie jeopardizing the whole deal with his barking. He’s become a master of the “indoor voice.” He’s even quieter than Eddie most of the time. 

“Yeah, it really sounds like he hates you.”

“He just wants something,” Eddie argues.

_ Yeah, for you to cheer up. _

“Maybe a walk.”

Eddie raises an eyebrow at him. “You want a walk?”

_ Sigh.  _ Why the hell not? Richie gives him two short barks in response, his version of  _ Yes. _

The most frustrating thing about  _ that _ is that Eddie always seems to get it: one bark for no, two for yes. He just never seems to wonder how his dog managed to develop this little code completely unprompted.

Or why a simple verbal explanation was ultimately all it took to get him to reluctantly wear a leash and collar on walks: “Come on, Buddy,  _ please –  _ it’s the fucking law, okay? I don’t make the law!”

It’s still reason número dos that Richie has a bone to pick with the Big Apple. They may have arrived at a compromise he can live with, but he still can’t quite bring himself to meet Eddie by the low-to-the-ground kitchen cabinet where he keeps his wicker basket of softcore bondage gear.

(Dog stuff, Richie. Normal, moderately unpleasant dog stuff.)

Of course Eddie doesn’t seem to mind coming to him, instead. 

While Eddie clips him into the harness, Richie lets himself get distracted by how cute it is that even with scattered boxes still tucked against every wall in this place, Eddie keeps things neat and tidy. He’s the human embodiment of those tacky wooden signs you only ever see in thrift stores: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”

Once Richie gets used to the feeling of something squishing down his fur, the harness really isn’t so bad. It’s just like wearing a vest, which makes the engraved collar tolerable if he thinks of it as a matching accessory. Like a scarf, but heavier.

He doesn’t even have to wear it indoors, and because the leash attaches to the harness, instead, he  _ also _ doesn’t have to feel like he’s being strangled on the rare occasions that Eddie gives it a tug.

Eddie offers Richie his hand and says, in a voice far too gentle to elicit obedience from any normal dog, “Shake?”

He even looks a little guilty about it. Richie huffs and places his paw gently in Eddie’s hand so he can examine it. 

“Well,” he sighs, reaching a disappointingly quick verdict, “am I even in good enough graces with you to get these on?”

He means the shoes the vet recommended for Richie’s paws, of course, and he’s awfully uncharitable about it; after all, Richie has yet to put up a fight over  _ that.  _ He even likes that Eddie happened to pick a shade of blue that Richie can actually see. 

He still doesn’t know what to make of the dog doc’s comments on the state of his feet, though. “Like he hasn’t had much opportunity to walk on them,” she said. “I’m surprised you found him in such good shape otherwise.”

Well, considering that he may or may not have sprung into spontaneous, fully-formed existence in the woods surrounding Derry, it’s not so strange. It’s not the strangest thing about this, by a long shot. 

“All set,” Eddie announces after strapping in the last of Richie’s paws. He watches him take a few tentative steps, then laughs when his slow walk becomes an exaggerated strut.

_ You should get me a bowtie, it’d really pull the outfit together. _

Unfortunately, Eddie’s already getting used to “Buddy’s” bizarre theatrics. “You might be the only dog on the planet that hates collars but actually fucking likes shoes.”

_ I’m also the only dog on the planet with my personality –  _ but not the only dog on the planet with  _ a  _ personality, which is the real roadblock here. A dog could choreograph a popular musical, write the next great American novel  _ and _ cure the common cold, and all he’d get for it is a handful of treats and an enthusiastic belly rub.

Richie wouldn’t say no to either, but that’s beside the point.

Down the stairs and out the door to the street below, the usual swell of noise and smell and motion draws Richie to a brief halt, just enough to reorient himself before Eddie gives his leash a gentle tug.

How every other dog on the planet manages to parse all of this, Richie will never understand. Maybe humans are actually a lot dumber than dogs, and if he had the mind of a dog to match this body, he’d be able to make perfect sense of the sensory overload. As it stands, there are moments where Richie almost appreciates the leash connecting him to Eddie; if it weren’t for that, there’s a non-zero chance he’d accidentally wander into traffic or bowl over one of Eddie’s geriatric neighbors – most of whom like Richie despite his reluctance to let any of them pet him. 

None of them are out and about now, which is almost a shame, considering the snacks Mrs. Garcia always seems to have on hand. Richie is very good at doing tricks when he stands to gain something from it – or just for fun, because it doesn’t take much for a dog to seem really impressive, and what’s better than an easy crowd?

The walk itself is brief, per the vet’s instructions, but Richie doesn’t mind. He spends a good portion of it with his nose to the ground; if there are any scent-based mysteries to be solved, he’ll definitely solve them.

Really, it’s half-and-half; when he isn’t looking with his nose, he’s looking with his eyes, sneaking glances up at Eddie, who has a habit of staring at him when they walk and so almost always catches him looking.

Obviously Richie knows it’s ridiculous to feel so caught out every time, just like it’s ridiculous that he still hasn’t gotten it through his thick dog skull that pretending not to look is pointless to begin with. He knows Eddie thinks nothing of it, beyond the occasional smile that makes Richie’s heart flutter in ways that a dog’s might not be meant to. Can dogs have heart attacks? Richie has no idea.

Eddie really does stare at him a lot, though. Richie figures the novelty of having a dog to walk must not have worn off for him yet; Richie hopes it never does, unless becoming a totally normal canine fixture means his human inclinations might start seeming more out of place, and one day Eddie will wake up and think, “Hey, something’s up with Buddy. Maybe I should give him a sheet of paper and some paint and let him try to write me a message.” 

What’s the worst that could happen if he did? He gets a lousy painting to stick to the fridge? Maybe something worth posting to Instagram? If “Buddy” got famous enough online, Eddie could start selling merch and spend less of his free time on the phone with clients who don’t know or care that he’s still struggling with shit he can’t talk to anyone but the Losers about.

_ Wish you’d talk to me, too,  _ Richie thinks.  _ Seriously, Eds, what’s the point of having a dog if you don’t make it listen to you complain all day? _

He’d complain right back if he could. He’d really live up to his potential to be the most annoying dog on the planet.

-*-

“Hey, Eddie.”

“Mike,” Eddie greets, tucking his phone between his ear and his shoulder instead of just putting it on speaker like a normal person. Richie’s still waiting for him to notice the faint burnt smell he’s pretty sure means he’s already overcooked his dinner, but a phone crash-landing in the middle of the pan might ruin more than just the texture of the meat.

That could work out in Richie’s favor;  _ he _ only cared about texture before he had a mouthful of fangs to chew with, and he’d be more than happy to trade his usual canned fare for something a little heartier.

“So,” Mike says. “How are things?”

Richie watches in dismay as Eddie’s shoulders tense. He reaches forward with his unencumbered hand to turn the heat off on the stove. The knob moves into place with a soft click.

“Things are fine. Considering,” he adds a little bitterly.

“So you’ve seen it.”

His tone makes Richie sit up a little straighter. Eddie fumbles to shift the phone to his hand. 

“Seen what? Mike? Seen  _ what?” _

“The…” Mike flounders for a moment, stammers jumbled bits of words in a nerve-wrackingly good imitation of Bill, and finally seems to accept that the only way out is through: “The news. The news about Richie.”

Eddie’s breath catches. Richie shoots to his feet and comes to paw anxiously at Eddie’s legs.

_ Yeah,  _ about  _ Richie— _

“Mike – Mike, what happened? They found him?” Eddie’s breath is coming faster and shallower now. Richie can feel Eddie’s calf quivering where he keeps his paw pressed against it, paralyzed himself.

“His parents filed a missing persons report, no, I don’t think they even – his manager didn’t know where he was going, Eddie. We’re the only ones who”—

“Is that supposed to be a good thing?” Eddie snaps.

_ I mean, I don’t want any of you getting arrested on my account,  _ Richie thinks. Is he panting? He’s definitely panting.  _ Plus telling people I’m literally dead would make coming back from this a little complicated. _

As if it weren’t already.

Maybe it was naive of him to assume that he could get back in touch with everyone in time to avoid…  _ this.  _ But what fucking difference does it make that he’s not dead? Even getting Eddie to figure out who he is won’t put his parents at ease. What’s he gonna do, call them up with his non-opposable, non-existent thumbs and bark out some morse code?

_ ‘Hey, it’s your son! I’m a dog now, but otherwise everything’s just fine with me! How have things been on your end?’ _

He doesn’t even know any morse code.

“No,” Mike says. “No – look, I just wanted to check on you. And I guess I’d rather you hear it from one of us.”

_ Probably the only way  _ I _ was gonna hear it at all. _

Eddie hasn’t turned away from the stove, and Richie can only see part of his face in profile. His voice is strained when he finally responds. 

“Thanks, Mike.”

Mike laughs humorlessly, a puff of static that quickly fizzles out. “Sorry I’m always making the worst calls at the worst possible times. Are you – you weren’t driving again, were you?”

_ Dude, just ask him if he’s okay.  _ He doesn’t fucking look okay.

Eddie’s laugh is so forced it hurts. Finally, he moves the pan off the burner with a metallic screech that sets Richie’s fur on end. “No, I was just, uh, burning dinner.” 

“Are you okay?”

_ There we go. _

“No – yes. Are  _ you?”  _

The funny thing is, Richie’s pretty sure he’s not being rhetorical, but it’s so classically “don’t you dare ever worry about me, fuck  _ you” Eddie _ that Richie feels the tiniest bit better hearing it.

Mike seems to take it the same way, with a whisper-quiet laugh and a sigh. “No. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

“You’re right about that,” Eddie mutters, too darkly. Something about that tone makes Richie’s hackles rise again.

Eddie’s breath is catching again before he manages to add, “Is it fucked up that – fuck, never mind, shit, I’m just gonna go… order takeout, Mike, thanks again for the call.”

“Okay. But you’re okay,” Mike repeats. 

“I’m as okay as you are.”

_ And I’m not a guy trapped in a dog,  _ Richie huffs.

“Keep in touch,” Mike says, still hesitant.

“Yeah.”

The soft background static of the call cuts out before Mike can say anything else. Instead of rescuing the remains of his dinner or dialing up some delivery joint to replace it, Eddie tosses his phone back onto the kitchen counter and sinks to the floor beside Richie – would’ve been  _ on  _ Richie, if he hadn’t had the foresight to move.

He’s crying before the back of his head hits the cabinets behind him.

Eventually, Richie graduates from poking and prodding at him with his paws to full-on headbutting him, and eventually his whining and pestering seems to pay off. Eddie drags himself back to his feet, pulls a fork from the silverware drawer by the sink, and… gets out one of Richie’s cans of food.

Richie’s heart sinks as he watches Eddie scoop the contents onto a saucer – his ongoing makeshift solution for not having bought an actual food bowl, and Richie’s excuse for the mess he makes every time he tries to eat from it.

This time, he ignores it when Eddie sets it down in front of him. It takes several beats of staring and frowning, but eventually Eddie kneels by him.

“What, aren’t you hungry?”

Richie responds by licking a long strip up his face.

Eddie, of course, immediately reels back with a disgusted groan. Richie continues to ignore his dinner while Eddie spends  _ way  _ too long rinsing his face in the sink, complete with gagging and swearing.

When he’s finally done, he turns to Richie looking, unfortunately, no happier or better distracted than he was before Richie’s little stunt.

Their staring contest resumes and continues unabated until Richie finally decides to stomp at the ground with one paw, a gesture he  _ hopes  _ will look like a stern “get your ass back down here.”

_ “No  _ licking,” Eddie warns – unbelievably, without batting an eye. And he actually  _ does  _ get his ass back down here, message received and understood.

_ Look, I know neither of us has ever had any pets, and I love you to pieces, Eds, but this is bad CGI fake dog bullshit and I literally can’t believe you’re willing to just roll with it. _

He even keeps his tongue where it belongs – lolling halfway out of his mouth – and all that gets him is an approving pat on the head. 

“Well, we can’t  _ both  _ eat ice cream for dinner,” Eddie sighs. “Come on, Buddy, just eat. Don’t be sick, I wouldn’t know what to…” He trails off with another sigh, this one a lot less steady. 

_ Ice cream for dinner is a pretty good way to honor my memory. It’s what I would have wanted. Actually, it’s what I  _ do  _ want, and if you don’t guard the spoon with your life I’m gonna have it. _

Eddie’s eyes track the back-and-forth path of Richie’s tail for a few moments, until finally he sniffs resolutely and wraps his arms clear around Richie – and that’s a trip, that he can get his short… nicely-muscled arms all the way around him on both sides and then some.

It’s tentative at first, like he’s waiting for Richie to wiggle out of the hug and go back to his overpriced canned meat, but he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. He wags his tail extra to make up for not being able to hug back. He leans into it as much as he can, until all he can feel or smell or hear is Eddie. Enveloped the way he is in all of his dreams, except that here he can hear Eddie crying into his fur, grasping hands tangled in it, his paws slipping on blue jeans.

Here, he can feel awful about not being able to do more.

_ God, Eds, I miss you like crazy. Miss being me with you. _

“Thank you. You’re so good, you’re such a good boy, thank you for being here…”

-*-

The sewing begins with a sneeze.

Richie doubts that his little head cold has anything to do with the gradually declining temperatures outside, unless you count his  _ rapidly _ escalating anxiety as a health risk. Eddie probably would. 

But Eddie doesn’t know as much about Richie’s mental state as he does about dog advice columns and videos and old wives’ tales, so he takes a break from his tabs upon tabs about the ongoing dead-end Richie Tozier missing persons case to shop for dog jackets online. Because cold weather equals cold dogs, cold dogs get a little sneezy, and  _ secretly,  _ Richie is pretty sure Eddie just wants to see him in a jacket.

_ Gonna go for the gray one or the gray-ish yellow one? Oh, that’s a nice shade of gray. _

Eddie is about as enthusiastic about his options as Richie is, and that’s in spite of the fact that  _ he  _ can actually tell what he’s looking at.

“These are all for tiny dogs.”

_ Have you  _ seen  _ chihuahuas? They’re pathetic, they need this stuff. _

Eddie shakes his head –  _ No, you haven’t seen chihuahuas? Great, I could never compete –  _ and finally pauses his scrolling to pick up his phone. Richie half expects him to be calling one of these dog attire companies to complain at them, but it’s Beverly who picks up.

“Eddie! How are you doing?”

“I’m doing,” Eddie says flatly. “Uh, so hypothetically, do you know how to make clothes for, like… dogs?”

Richie makes a weird choking sound in lieu of laughter. Holy shit.

Naturally, Bev is delighted. “Is this for Buddy? Let me guess – you want to dress him up for Halloween?”

_ I vote werewolf. _

“No, just…” Eddie glances sidelong at Richie, considering. “…You could do that?”

Beverly laughs like she’s just been handed the key to the city. “Yes,” she allows, so conspiratorial that Richie feels like he’s in on it even before she adds, “but I have a better idea.”

-*-

“Come on, it’s not that different from working on a car,” Beverly says, reaching past Eddie to show him again how to thread the needle on her surprisingly ancient sewing machine. Eddie gives her a pointed look, and she laughs. “I’m assuming.”

He finally gets it on the fourth try. Richie comes over to congratulate him, but Beverly intercepts while Eddie is busy grinning to himself over his first little victory.

“You’ll have a full wardrobe in no time,” she coos, running her hands over Richie’s ears so that they flatten before springing upright again. 

_ Hopefully it won’t be that long.  _ The thought is half-hearted, though; Richie doesn’t stop craning his neck in Eddie’s direction until Beverly snorts and lets him brush past her.

“At this rate he’ll have one jacket by next spring,” Eddie complains – also half-heartedly.

_ Uh-oh, I’ll have caught a dozen colds by then. _

“It’ll be slow going at first, but I think it’ll pick up once you’ve got the basics.”

“How many ‘basics’ are left?”

Beverly settles back onto the bench beside him. “Well, we’re not gonna be sewing any actual jackets today…” She laughs and elbows Eddie when his face falls. “I’ll make him a little something in the meantime so he doesn’t freeze to death in sub-seventy degree weather.”

Ah, at least he can count on Bev to make up for his own inability to poke fun at Eddie. 

“Something light,” Eddie hedges.

“I’ll be sure to run the colors by you first,” Beverly promises solemnly. 

“Blue would match his shoes. Plus blue and black look good together, right?”

Beverly notices Richie’s tail start to wag and gestures at him. “Looks like we have audience approval.”

_ Yeah, guys, because dogs understand the word “blue” and the concept of color coordination. Come on! _

Tough luck – without bothering to examine that little mystery any further, they get right back down to business going over the parts, pieces and functions of Beverly’s sewing machine – or Eddie does, asking increasingly specific questions until Beverly belatedly remembers to put them back on track. Basics, not “the ins and outs of creating your own sewing patterns.”

It’s cute how ahead of himself Eddie gets; he looks like he wants nothing more than to learn how to follow a pattern just so he can move on to modifying them.

When it comes to more of the hands-on stuff, putting some basic stitches into a scrap of fabric and narrowly avoiding driving the needle through a wayward finger, Richie has to contain his jealousy.

It reminds him of when they were kids, watching the others play games on Bill’s NES while he impatiently waited his turn. The only difference now is he’s never going to get a turn.

Defeating an evil space alien and then having to live vicariously through three hours of sewing lessons wasn’t the leap he expected his 2016 to take, but here he is, fucking with the foot pedal and ruining Eddie’s work because he wasn’t listening when Beverly explained that it controls the speed of the needle.

He actually feels pretty bad for that, and would have without the scolding he gets for almost stabbing Eddie’s thumb a second time.

The actual worst part is Eddie’s guilty-exasperated, “He’s just a dog – you’re just a dog, it’s okay, you didn’t know”—because he’s  _ not,  _ and he can’t just start growling at Eddie about it, and it’s not Richie’s fault that he gets  _ bored. _

It’s not really Eddie’s, either, though. He even spends some time complaining to Bev about his ingrate dog’s total disinterest in every toy he’s tried to give him.

“Have you tried fetch?”

_ At this point I’d be willing to make fetch happen. _

“I will. I mean, every dog likes fetch,” Eddie says. He doesn’t sound like he actually has any idea what every dog likes. 

_ You also haven’t tried tug-of-war.  _ Like an arm-wrestling rematch, adjusting for the fact that Richie doesn’t have human arms or hands to play with. 

“And tug-of-war,” Beverly says. Eerie. 

“I don’t wanna get bitten.”

_ I wouldn’t bite you! _

“Buddy wouldn’t do that, would you?” Richie tilts his head at them and barks once for “no,” and Eddie snorts. Whether he gets it or not, Richie isn’t sure, but when Beverly adds, “He probably just doesn’t want to play alone,” and Richie delivers his signature two barks –  _ Yeah, entertain me! –  _ Eddie gives him a look that’s almost curious.

Curious is good, especially when it’s directed at him. It gives Richie’s flagging mood a much-needed boost, and then his ears pick up the tell-tale crinkling, clinking and sloshing of plastic bags stuffed with groceries – not for the first time since they all sat down for lesson one, but this time Richie is there to greet Ben when he finally gets the front door open and comes in lugging a lot more than just groceries – including what appears to be an armful of lumber.

“Oh, you’re still here!” he laughs.

_ Is there a Ben Hanscom buried under all that stuff, or should I be sounding the alarm? _

“Ben!” Beverly calls from the craft room back down the hall – somehow both the messiest and most thoroughly unpacked portion of her own divorcee apartment.

Technically, Ben doesn’t live here.  _ Practically,  _ Richie would never have known the difference, the way the whole place smells so much like both of them.

Plus, he’s here with groceries and mysterious extras that may or may not also be destined for the craft room.

“We’ll be right out!”

“No rush!” Ben answers. To Richie, he says, “And you – hang on. I don’t wanna step on any paws.”

If it weren’t for his earlier fuck-up, Richie would have decided to weave around his legs as he makes his way to the counter and starts gingerly setting stuff down – besides, as funny as it seems to him, the idea here is to make it really obvious that he understands the shit people say to him. He can play bad dog when more people are in on the joke.

When Ben’s done flexing his fingers to get some blood flow back into them, he crouches and beckons Richie over for a proper hello.

_ Good to see you too, Haystack. _

“How come he doesn’t try to lick  _ your  _ face?”

“If anyone’s gonna lick him, it’s gonna be me.”

“H-hey, Eddie,” Ben stammers, rushing to his feet as blood rushes to his face. As usual, Richie doesn’t need to be able to see red to know that. Ben still leans into the kiss Beverly plants on his cheek, while Eddie very much doesn’t return the greeting.

_ Young love.  _ God, Richie wishes he could join in on the teasing. 

_ C’mon, Eds, you’re barely even intruding on their moment. Imagine overhearing every phone call your best friend makes  _ all _ the time. _

And secretly living with him. Richie doesn’t look forward to finding out just how mad Eddie’s gonna be about that.

Eddie’s eyes light up when he notices the contents of some of Ben’s bags. “What’s all that for?”

“Eating,” Ben says, very suspiciously.

“You guys eat hammers?”

“Oh, Ben,” Beverly laughs. “I had a  _ hammer  _ already.”

Ben grins at her before turning to Eddie. “I guess I got a little carried away. Uh… it’s for Buddy, actually – but that’s all I’m saying for now. It was supposed to be a surprise.”

_ Gonna build me a rolling platform to sit on so I don’t have to look up at you guys all the time? _

Eddie looks between him and Bev, whose own smug grin just screams “I know exactly what’s going on.”

She leans in close to Eddie and stage-whispers, “Don’t even think about giving him the ‘you don’t have to do that’ speech you gave me,” and then more loudly, “We’re having fun with it.”

It takes Eddie a minute to sort out a response; in the meantime, he breaks into that soft, private smile Richie so rarely sees on him now that they’re adults with bad marriages and  _ responsibilities.  _

“Thanks,” he says. “I’m… I’m having fun, too.”

_ Don’t look so guilty about it… _

“Great,” Ben says, in that “because we’re worried about you and really bad at being subtle about it” tone of voice Richie has heard all of the Losers use lately, regardless of how little Eddie actually lets on about how he’s doing post-Derry – and as far as any of them knows, post-Richie bleeding out in a sewer. “Speaking of food, do you wanna…”

He seems to think better of it and defers to Bev instead. She shrugs and finishes Ben’s sentence for him: “Stay for dinner?”

Eddie’s smile turns forced. “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass on third-wheeling tonight. Besides, this spoiled dog’s dinner is already late.”

Not spoiled  _ enough,  _ in Richie’s opinion; so what if human food is suddenly a minefield of potential poisons? He’ll show his canine stomach who’s boss if it means he can enjoy a nice, home-cooked meal.

“Next time we’ll have cans ready for him here,” Bev threatens.

Eddie snorts. “I’ll text you what I usually get him.”

He pauses one last time before they leave, after he’s already got the harness and leash back on Richie. 

“By the way, do you still have the owner’s manual?”

“For the sewing machine?” Bev guesses. “Nope, threw it out the day I got it.”

Eddie looks utterly incredulous until Beverly laughs and says, “Yeah, I have it. Why, do you wanna borrow it?”

“Yeah,” Eddie sighs, visibly relieved. He gestures in the general direction of the sewing room. “I think it’d help me make better sense of all this.”

“Sure, then it’s homework.”

Eddie lets Richie pull the leash right out of his hand – defeat number one in their new, hopefully ongoing tug-of-war contest – and walk himself down the hall after her, to the delight of literally everyone.

It takes rifling through no less than three bins of miscellaneous craft supplies for Bev to come up with a yellowed paper booklet. When she and Richie return, Eddie accepts it with a slight roll of his eyes that morphs into another smile when Beverly adds, “I draw the line at taking my machine apart, though, just so you know.”

_ If it goes missing— _

“If it goes missing, don’t blame me,” Eddie says. He kind of flubs the delivery, but Ben and Bev laugh anyway. Bev punches her open palm – “Try it, Kaspbrak, I  _ will  _ fuck you up.”

No one says what Richie suspects they’re all thinking, which is that he sounded like Richie. Even took the words right out of his mouth.

-*-

Eddie has a pet, and Richie has a pet theory.

Two words: coma dream.

It just makes sense; all of his dreams are the same, and he knows for a fact that  _ normal  _ dogs have normal dreams, about chasing stuff and eating treats. They probably don’t dream of floating in a detached, semi-physical state void of most sensation, but that could totally be his brain trying to make sense of a hospital bed. It would explain the constant white light, if not also the oppressive silence.

It would also explain how he’s managed to go over two months now without raising enough suspicion to warrant a single important question. No messages and not many opportunities to make them without getting dragged away, gently scolded or ignored.

If he could run this theory by Eddie, he’s willing to bet he’d score a long, rambling, Google search-fueled rant about how a completely linear, perfectly mundane – unless you count being trapped in a dog’s body, in which case it’s both absurd and impossible – but still, how a pretty normal day-to-day just doesn’t seem reasonable for a coma.

There’s also this weird, unshakeable certainty Richie has that there was a moment between losing consciousness and waking up where he died –  _ really  _ died, no medical technicalities, no under-a-minute heart-stoppages or temporary brain death.

He’s pretty sure brain death means no lucid dreams.  _ Pretty sure. _

Whether he’s dreaming or not, though, he doesn’t have the heart to ignore  _ Eddie’s  _ dreams. His nightmares, really. He couldn’t ignore  _ that _ even if he knew beyond any doubt that it was all just a Pennywise illusion.

Usually, Eddie murmurs apologies and shuts Richie out in the hall for the night, but the door to his bedroom doesn’t actually lock, and an unlocked door is just within the realm of things Richie can manage without fingers and thumbs.

He’s snuck into Eddie’s room before,  _ once,  _ and only because he forgot it was Saturday and was worried that Eddie was gonna be late to work. Eddie was annoyed, but dogs do things like that.

Maybe a smart one could also decide to wake someone up who’s gasping and crying out in their sleep, because normal dogs that have normal dreams must also have bad ones from time to time.

Of course, having accomplished his B&E – which involved so much scratching at the knob, it’s a wonder that didn’t wake Eddie up all on its own – Richie has to figure out how to calm his friend down without the benefit of language.

He can’t get Eddie’s name out right and he worries it’ll just creep Eddie out more after he wakes up shuddering and shoving uncoordinatedly at the unexpected company filling up his side of the bed. So, he switches to soft  _ woofs,  _ just to say  _ I’m here. It’s just me. _

Doesn’t even matter which “me” he has to be for him.

“Oh, you fucking escape artist,” Eddie groans when his hands find Richie’s nose. Richie has to close his eyes to avoid having them poked out.

He licks Eddie’s palm. It’s the first time Eddie hasn’t immediately flinched from it, though he does let out a shaky sigh and wipe it on the sheets.

Initiating a hug is tricky, too, but Eddie gets the idea after Richie awkwardly places his paw on Eddie’s shoulder in a completely unsuccessful attempt at pulling him in. 

“Someone’s feeling extra cuddly, huh,” Eddie mumbles, squishing Richie against his chest. He smells like sweat and – adrenaline, maybe. That scent people always seem to have when they’re really freaked out about something. “The stink of fear” or whatever the fuck the clown said. It was one of the stupider things to ever come out of Its mouth, so the fact that it wasn’t completely bullshit kind of makes Richie want to find a way to go back in time just to add “dog” to the list of insults they used to kill It. He’ll even take the L that comes with being one, himself.

“You’re lucky,” Eddie says, and sniffles. “You’ve probably never had a bad dream in your life.”

_ Not in this one,  _ Richie answers. The garbled sound makes Eddie laugh.

He lets go of Richie and goes to the door, but he doesn’t make any move to usher him back out into the hall, just closes it with a soft click and squeak of hinges before returning to the bed.

Before he settles back in, he steals a quick glance at his phone and sighs – so it must be closer to morning than he would’ve preferred. At the rate his heart is still going, Richie doubts he’ll be able to fall asleep fast, but he always tries anyway.

Eyes on Richie, he frees one hand from under the covers and pats the spot right beside him. “If you want out, it’s now or never.”

_ Like I couldn’t get out by myself.  _ It’d be a little harder given that the door would have to swing inward, though, that he’ll grant.

He waits until Eddie sighs and closes his eyes to actually take him up on his offer. The difference between a dog bed and human mattress may not mean much to his quadrupedal spine, but it means the world to him. It’s soft, and warm, and a whole lot less lonely than his customary spot in the living room.

It probably doesn’t make him less of a creep for basically tricking Eddie into sharing his bed with a guy.

Neither does trying to at least maintain a somewhat respectful distance between them, but Eddie kind of ruins that himself, anyway, by reaching across the covers and taking Richie’s paw in hand as soon as he’s settled in.

He falls asleep holding it, and Richie stays wide awake for hours watching the slow rise and fall of his chest, imagining what it would be like to be able to lace their fingers together.

That’s the first night he spends in Eddie’s bed, and it’s the last night he doesn’t just join him there from the get-go.

-*-

The walks they take together eventually evolve into longer and longer jogs. Reluctantly, Richie adds that to his mental list of silver linings; Buddy’s got a well of untapped energy that Richie hasn’t had in over a decade – hell, he could outrun Eddie if he wanted to. He’s the fountain of youth on four legs.

Silver linings all come with a little gray, too, of course. Those frequent trips out with Eddie, sweat-soaked in clothes that highlight the muscles he picked up somewhere along the way, twenty-odd years since he was almost as bony as Richie himself – those are the times when Richie has to try the hardest to swallow down so much wanting that it could almost choke him, and his lolling, dripping tongue feels like it suits him so well that his own self-disgust gets to be almost too much.

Eddie never seems to know what to make of his dog’s sudden post-run reticence. Richie doesn’t know how he manages to keep his own thoughts at bay, running without music or anyone to talk to.

He’s noticed a trend with Eddie, though, and that’s that he’s constantly so focused on keeping himself as busy as possible between work, work _ -outs, _ sewing lessons, divorce meetings, phone calls, unpacking and so on that the emotional fallout of having to slow down is like poking a needle-sized hole in an overinflated balloon. He bought and set up a new TV the week they moved from the hotel to their apartment, but it wasn’t until weeks later that Richie discovered how  _ off  _ TV looks to him. 

(There’s the color, sure, but now he notices how artificial the sound is, how it’s missing details, how the post-production foley stuff just sounds…  _ wrong,  _ and how even with a fancy HD smart TV the motion on-screen is all jerky and disjointed, like an eternally buffering YouTube video.)

YouTube is worse, though, and Richie would know, because Eddie uses  _ that  _ a lot lately. 

Sometimes, it’s for “how to” videos – sewing stuff, mostly. Some cooking, including people making food for their pets, and some auto mechanic tutorials, all of which go over Richie’s head and most of which Eddie leaves snappish comments on. 

Mostly, it’s for videos of Richie. Recorded pieces of TV specials, really old bits that were probably filmed on mid-2000s camcorders, and a few low-quality phone videos Richie’s surprised his team hasn’t gotten taken down. Worrying about copyright claims must take a backseat to managing the sudden disappearance of the guy in the videos that violate them.

Richie genuinely doesn’t know if watching them makes Eddie feel better or worse. He knows  _ he’d _ feel better if Eddie laughed at more of it. At best, he gets a few dry chuckles to boost his ego. At worst, he resorts to “accidentally” knocking Eddie’s laptop onto the floor while he tries to cuddle him.

Richie worries that it’s all just Eddie’s way of twisting the knife. He can’t ask him to knock it off, remind him that hearing  _ his own voice  _ when he can’t fucking use it himself isn’t exactly a cakewalk, either, maybe even just rib him about what a big fan he must be – so he runs damage control.

And he gets why Eddie has to keep himself so busy. It’s either that, or he winds up cross-legged on the couch after a run and a shower with his hair still hanging damp across his forehead, listlessly staring up at the ceiling while old recordings of Richie’s shows play through his laptop’s speakers and Richie himself lies curled up beside him.

They both jump when Eddie’s phone starts ringing. Eddie looks so tense even after he sees whoever’s name is on the caller ID that Richie suspects it’s either his lawyer or Myra’s.

Either way, he forgets to actually pause the video before he picks up. Richie tries to do it for him, but Eddie is too quick to guide his paw away from the keyboard and too distracted to see what he’s getting at.

Richie doesn’t expect it to be Stan who exchanges a few awkward pleasantries with Eddie while the latter looks like he’s still kicking himself just for picking up. 

Following an increasingly awkward silence, Stan clears his throat and tentatively says, “Is that…?”

Eddie slams the computer shut with enough force to crack the screen. The background chatter of audience laughter promptly cuts out, and he drags a palm down his face. “So  _ what?” _

Stan is quiet for a moment, and his next words are careful. “Does that help?”

Eddie opens his mouth to answer. Closes it fast, shoves the computer onto the floor so Richie doesn’t have to. Richie can hear his throat working, but the tears still come before the words do.

“What the fuck do you think?”

It still sounds like someone’s strangling him, but in his defense, Stan doesn’t sound so hot, either. “They’re not very good, are they?”

Eddie shakes his head, but what he actually says is, “No, they’re – he – he was”—

_ Hysterical? Totally original? The best possible way to pass a Sunday afternoon? _

“He got better at the delivery, at least,” Stanley offers. “He was good at that.”

“He was  _ always _ good at that,” Eddie says with a lot of conviction. “He was – he was funny. It’s just, the material wasn’t. He could’ve – he should’ve been writing his own, Stan.”

His stance is so closed-off, Richie has to wiggle his way into his space nose-first. But Eddie lets him make a big furry annoyance of himself, right down to petting his head when he licks at the tears on his cheeks. No complaints, no disgusted sighs or pulling away.

Who woulda guessed that Eddie’s been giving Richie’s career more thought than Richie has, himself? He’s still stuck on the whole “vanishing off the face of the earth for months on end” thing and all the professional troubles that are sure to come from that, and here Eddie is, charting a trajectory that goes way beyond salvaging what Richie already had. 

“Maybe he would’ve been,” Stan agrees. “And making all of us listen to the rough drafts, probably.”

_ And spoil the surprise? _

The circle of Eddie’s arms tightens around Richie, and his breath hitches. “I wish I could. As often as he wanted, I –  _ fuck,  _ Stan, people all over the  _ country  _ miss him!”

_ No they don’t, _ Richie thinks.  _ They’re just chomping at a juicy story, and when they move on, that’ll be it. _

That’s really what keeps him up at night.  _ That’ll be it.  _ At least he’ll still have his living, breathing best friend to prove that something about it all actually mattered. 

“Not as much as we do.”

_ You wouldn’t have to, if you’d just pay a little more attention. _

“Stan,” Eddie sighs, “can I ask you something?”

He’s scared, Richie realizes. Stan seems to notice, too, thank god. “Of course, Eddie.”

“When Richie died,” Eddie begins, and has to take a moment to recover. Richie wonders if Eddie can feel his heart racing, or if he’s shaking enough for Eddie to feel it. “He said… the last thing he said,  _ ever,  _ he fucking… smiled at me, even though he had to have been in so much fucking  _ pain,  _ and he said, ‘You’ll be okay.’”

Well, fine, it wasn’t one of Richie’s better one-liners, but he  _ was  _ running on like twenty-five percent less blood than his brain was used to at the time. If he could redo it now, he’d probably say something like, “Hey, so in, I don’t know, an hour or two, I’m gonna come back as a dog, so could you maybe keep an eye out for that? Maybe come meet me in the woods near Neibolt so I don’t have to walk the whole way?”

Stan sucks in a breath. “Alright.”

“‘Alright?’ He  _ took a bullet for me  _ the literal instant he was coherent enough to see what was happening, he – he traded – I got him killed, Stan, and – and that’s all he had to say about it?”

_ No, Eddie, no no no— _

“Eddie, hang on”—

“No, I did! We all know I did, and you know what the worst thing is? Sometimes  _ I’m  _ mad at  _ him,  _ because all he had to do was say that, like it’s easy, but he’s not fucking here to make it happen!”

Richie squirms away so abruptly that Eddie drops his phone trying to let him go.

He doesn’t go far, just far enough to get Eddie to look at him –  _ really  _ look at him – and while Eddie is blinking through tears and worrying more about keeping his phone from slipping between the cushions, Richie still hears Stan start to answer.

“That’s normal, Eddie,” and Eddie presses the phone back to his ear while Richie whines and whines at him, “It’s normal to be angry – even at Richie. Or yourself,” he says more gently, “but that isn’t true. We all took that risk.”

He pauses. 

“Was that the question?”

Eddie shakes his head and scoots away from Richie when he barks too loudly at him.

_ Eddie— _

He scoffs. “What, ‘am I an asshole for being pissed at my friend for dying?’”

“No,” Stan says, and even though Eddie is finally looking at Richie again, smoothing back his puffed-up fur and massaging the base of his flattened ears, nothing happens. Richie tries to say his name, Eddie’s,  _ Stan’s,  _ and Eddie just frowns because he thinks he’s somehow managed to scare his dog by talking about a dead man in front of him. 

_ I get why you’re mad,  _ Richie tries to say, and god, it’s just downright unfair that he can still get headaches like this. Feels like everything he wants to say is pounding at the inside of his skull, and he can’t get a single word out.  _ I get it, Eddie, it was fucking stupid to think I wouldn’t hurt you. _

He meant something different to Eddie than Eddie means to him, but  _ something  _ still hurts to lose. Richie just foisted all that pain onto him – he didn’t have  _ time  _ to think about it, though, and now that he has all the time in the world –  _ I could never apologize for saving you. _

He’ll still move on, eventually, and eventually he’ll be glad he’s around. He’ll be around long enough to have so many more dogs. After Buddy, maybe Chuck, or Fats or Bo or even Elvis, because Eddie probably doesn’t know what an asshole that guy was and Richie… might not be around to tell him.

Maybe he’s not under a space alien clown’s curse, or trapped in a coma dream or a reverse weredog waiting for a full moon to finally  _ do  _ something for him.

Maybe he’s just supposed to accept that. 

You know – let go. Listen to Stan finally get to the original point of his call, listen to him invite Eddie to a Thanksgiving dinner at his and Patty’s place and try not to feel that awful, clawing yearning to be able to join them as Richie, to gather ‘round a table and tell bad jokes and not have to watch Eddie cry over him.

That’s  _ hard,  _ though, because instead of finding something else to distract himself with after the call ends, Eddie picks his computer up off the floor and starts searching for “how to” videos Richie’s never seen him watch before – stuff like “how to tell someone you’re gay,” “coming out,” and then, following a streaming session of half a dozen chipper advice videos – some good, some bad, all played at a breakneck two times their default speed – “how to get over someone.”

Eddie doesn’t click on any of those results, but he does let his mouse hover too long over titles that don’t leave much room for doubt.

Whether Richie is irreparably dead, trapped in a coma or being tested by the cosmic powers that be, this is gonna be the thing he cites when he finds someone or something to enact some well-deserved revenge on. 

_ I loved him, I  _ love _ him, you’re telling me he might have loved me too and I can’t even say it back? I have to watch it eat him up instead? Fuck this, fuck that, and fuck you!  _

In a perfect world, giving Eddie the best dog approximation of a kiss on the – well, as close to the lips as he dares to get – would be enough to put things right. There’d be a spark – of recognition, a sudden transformation, a burst of color, a happily ever after, and Eddie would look something other than mildly taken aback.

“Well, at least I know my dog supports me,” he says, planting a return kiss between Richie’s wide eyes. “Maybe I’ll practice on you.”

He smiles. Richie can’t smile back any more than he can cry his little heart out about how that should have worked, according to every “Frog Prince”-inspired rule in the book, that should have worked, but he  _ can  _ sit back, awkwardly balanced on the plush cushions of Eddie’s couch, and give him the best “paying attention” face he can muster.

Eddie’s smile broadens into a grin, so who cares if Richie has zero intention of actually acting like a dog? That doesn’t count as failing to make peace – if anything, it’s the closest he can come to making amends.

-*-

Eddie’s penchant for bragging about how smart his dog is will never  _ not  _ be funny, and not just to Richie.

He will, for example, be in the midst of a rowdy Losers Club conference call masquerading as a serious Thanksgiving planning session – who’ll make what, who’ll sleep where, are Ben and Bev done pretending to take turns with the couch yet or should Stan and Patty invest in an extra rollaway – and  _ somehow,  _ he still manages to steer the conversation back to his incredibly talented dog.

He’s so  _ polite,  _ you see, he only barks when people around him talk because he wants to feel included –  _ True, but you don’t have to call me on it –  _ and he knows so many words, like Koko the gorilla except he can’t use sign language,  _ Fuck, I should have been a monkey –  _

“And I don’t know how to train a dog to do _anything,_ so I swear I’m not making this up, he really taught himself to use the toilet. Isn’t that convenient? He actually hates being brought outside to pee, it’s the weirdest thing – yeah, I mean, he has his _own_ bathroom, what the hell, Mike, that would be gross…”

They let him go on like that for a while, until finally Bill breaks and asks if Buddy also fetches the newspaper for him.

“Fuck you.”

_ Yeah, and I also cook him breakfast every morning.  _

Well, he would if he could.  _ Eddie _ does it for  _ him.  _ Not every morning, but those dog food tutorial videos are definitely starting to pay off.

“There’s something you might have to actually train him to do,” Stan says, dry but good-natured.

“Wanna bet?”

_ Obviously,  _ if Eddie subscribed to paper copies of anything, he wouldn’t have to train Richie to deliver it straight to his hand, because Richie would do it just for a laugh – or better yet, he’d shred the paper and arrange the scraps to say something like “HELP” or “RICHIE” or maybe “REDRUM,” because who else but him would make a stupid reference to one of Bill’s bestsellers?

-*-

Stan the Man and Patty “Babylove” Uris have the kind of capital-B Beautiful house that simultaneously looks like it’s several years overdue for a “baby on the way” makeover and absolutely off-limits to four-legged animals, ergo, Richie feels like he should be sneaking around from the first moment he sets foot in there.

Of course that isn’t actually the case; Stanley’s lovely wife greets the four of them – Ben, Bev, Eddie and his dashingly well-dressed dog – at the door with an honest-to-god  _ plate  _ of what appear to be cookies already in hand.

There’s so much to smell that Richie doesn’t realize they’re actually treats for  _ him  _ until Patty offers him one – with Eddie’s cheerful permission, of course.

While Richie devours it right out of Patty’s outstretched palm – to her utter delight – Eddie laughs and thanks her for helping him make amends for the cramped flight down here. 

“He handled it better than us,” Beverly points out with a grimace. She and Ben have been not-so-discreetly massaging their sore backs since  _ before  _ they piled out of the rental car, so Richie  _ would _ be inclined to agree; even in first-class with friends for company, flying sucks.

It just sucks a lot more when you’re stuck cooling your heels in a crate in cargo.

Like pretty much everything that sucks about being a dog, that wasn’t Eddie’s fault. Airline policy, et cetera. He spent the whole ride from the airport to Stanley’s tucked into the backseat with his fingers laced through the bars of Richie’s carrier, making more impressive puppy dog eyes at him than Richie could ever hope to achieve in the body of an actual puppy dog, and who could possibly hold a grudge against _ that? _

The second the car stopped and the cage door opened, he made a point of letting Eddie know,  _ Hey, no hard feelings,  _ and when he’s done enjoying his before-dinner snack, he makes an additional point of begging a few head-scritches off of him, just so he knows he hasn’t been replaced as Buddy’s favorite just yet.

Thanksgiving isn’t even until tomorrow, but there’s something good cooking in the kitchen already; while his travel companions get themselves set up in their respective guest rooms, Richie goes ahead and joins the other four there.

He finds them all nursing glasses of wine – Bill leaning up against some cupboards, Stan and Patty shoulder-to-shoulder by the stove, the oven light left on so that Richie can both see  _ and _ smell the fish baking inside, and all of them laughing at the tail end of one of Mike’s stories. He’s grown a beard that Richie is just dying to compliment him on.

He stops self-consciously touching it when he catches sight of Richie.

“There he is, the one that got away!”

Richie wants a hug, but he’ll settle for enthusiastic pats and a few more treats than Eddie would typically let slip. He shouldn’t be surprised that Patty wasn’t the only one who came prepared to woo him.

“We  _ just  _ got here and you guys are already trying to fatten up my dog?”

Tail still wagging out of control, Richie turns to bark at Eddie:  _ What else are you guys gonna eat tomorrow night? _

Stanley laughs. “You weren’t kidding; he does ‘talk.’”

Richie barks again:  _ Put on some decent music and I’ll show you singing, too. _

Bill takes a knee to tuck Richie’s mini necktie back into the jacket Eddie and Bev made him for Halloween – a Buddy Holly costume, naturally. There’s even a child-sized pair of thick-rimmed, lensless glasses buried somewhere back home. Richie’s still a little bitter that putting those things on him – even if it  _ was  _ only long enough to get a few pictures – wasn’t enough to spark some kind of eureka moment. 

They were uncomfortable, not made for a long face and a dog’s ears, but they made him feel and look like a better facsimile of himself. 

Even without them, the tie and jacket help. The top is sewn to look like two layers, a dress shirt-jacket combo, and because Eddie’s still learning, it’s a little sloppy, but Richie loves it, and Eddie knows he loves it, and that’s why he’s wearing it now, to keep him calm on the ride down here.

Plan B was sedatives, but Eddie seems to think that the outfits he and Bev make for Richie function like those pressure jackets they make for neurotic dogs.

Little does he know, Richie just likes not being totally naked from time to time. And he’s  _ barely _ neurotic.

“Makes you wonder about his background,” Bill says, straightening up and nearly spilling his wine on Richie in the process. 

_ My resume is a lot more impressive than you’d think. _

“Buddy?” Ben guesses. He and Bev join in a fresh round of awkward half-hugs before accepting their own precariously-filled glasses – Bev only after clarifying that they don’t happen to have a bottle of stronger stuff squirreled away anywhere. Anything just a little less fruity – if alcohol weren’t strictly forbidden to him anyway, Richie could sympathize.

“Maybe he ran away from a circus,” Patty suggests, and then claps a hand to her mouth too late to stop the faux pas from happening – and ain’t that something, that she knows something about all  _ that. _

A few of them just groan, and Bev says, “He  _ could  _ make it in show business,” while eyeing Richie curiously.

_ Huh.  _

Richie’s ensuing silence is deafening to him, but no one else seems to notice – Eddie included, because Mike follows that up with an intriguing suggestion of his own: “Or a service dog.”

“A service… a service dog? What, like for therapy?”

Mike shrugs. “I don’t know. For anything.”

“He could fly in the cabin,” Ben points out.

“Contingent on  _ me  _ having some card that says I need a service dog,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes. Richie winces internally, because – hey, they could all use one, a service dog or just a therapist.  _ He  _ could use one, and Eddie could  _ definitely  _ use one.

Of course no one dares to go down that particular conversational rabbit hole. Richie doesn’t blame them, but he still kind of wishes someone would, because even if talking to a therapist about the gory, black-magical details of everything that went down in Derry isn’t possible without earning a (fair, but wildly off-base) diagnosis as mild-to-moderately psychotic, the abridged version is still something.

Maybe something that could take away the guilt and the nightmares and the less-than-helpful coping mechanisms.

Plus, Richie wouldn’t mind taking some kind of service dog training course. He could probably do in ten minutes of verbal instruction what it would take your average dog weeks or months to learn. Pass a test, get a certificate, skip the cage and maybe finally put his thus-far mostly worthless human intelligence to actual use.

-*-

While normally Richie can snarf a meal in just a few minutes, no problem, he figures his friends’ mutual silent agreement to at least let him eat at the same time as them warrants a special effort to slow down and savor it.

That goes double when Patty reveals that she set aside a small portion of fish just for him, and triple when Eddie makes a special effort to pull it apart with a fork and knife in search of tiny bones that could hurt his throat. Quadruple when he adds some white rice to the plate, so it looks like a real meal.

The only thing he doesn’t like about the arrangement is being relegated to a corner of the dining room, well away from a table big enough for eight,  _ set  _ for eight, but he only has to drag his food a few inches with his teeth before Ben gets up and helpfully moves it in a little closer.

He waits until dessert to try hopping up to sit in the chair that is, after all,  _ meant  _ for him, but it goes over about as well as he should have expected it to; Eddie in particular looks like he’s taken a gut-punch, and while no one seems to have the heart to tell him to get down, he gets the message anyway. 

It takes a while for conversation to resume post-his trillionth, increasingly half-assed attempt at getting recognized, but it does resume, and although Richie’s been bracing himself for it for weeks, the feeling of being on the outside looking in still hurts like hell.

He dozes in and out of a movie sprawled across Mike and Eddie’s laps, but it feels less like dipping in and out of consciousness and more like he’s blipping between two realities – one warm, one lonely, one dim, one bright, one bursting with familiar scents and gentle chatter and the other so sterile and silent it’s like being three kinds of blind.

It’s the first time since the dreams started that Richie has chosen to actively avoid them; when the party breaks for bed, Richie joins Eddie in his room long enough to see him fall asleep. He leaves when he’s sure his struggle to open the door won’t wake him.

What he really wants is some fresh air and a chance to run around, but the locked sliding door that would let him out onto the back deck is well beyond him, so poking his nose through the shuttered blinds and staring sulkily out the window it is. 

A door opens, too close to be Eddie’s. Richie recognizes Beverly’s footsteps approaching even before her scent reaches him. That gives him plenty of time to curl up on the floor and feign sleep, but not quite enough to stop the shades gently clacking back and forth against each other. 

He hears her pause when she sees him, but it’s brief. After a moment, she shuffles past him into the kitchen, where she gets down what sounds like two glasses – or a glass and a coffee mug, maybe – and then fills them both with water from the faucet. 

She lingers for a while, taking slow sips from one of the cups, and then comes the sound of two sticky surfaces being separated. A hollow  _ pop  _ followed by the sharp, headache-y scent of a marker, and squeaky, sloppy writing… on a Post-it note?

Seriously? Richie’s been known to have late-night ideas worth writing down, too, but in 2016, it’s easier to jot incomprehensible stuff down on your phone before you roll back over to sleep, no cross-house treks required. It must be easier to draw clothing designs on paper, or something, although for argument’s sake, Richie makes a mental note to look into free drawing apps if he ever gets the chance. 

He’s still debating the possible existence of an MS Paint copycat for phones when Beverly surprises him by carrying her assorted handful of stuff not back down the hall toward her and Ben’s bedroom, but toward his spot by the door.

She catches him peeking up at her with one eye open, but there’s something off about the way she smiles at him.

Richie raises his head and blinks at the bowl of water she sets in front of him, and then at her for sitting down on the carpet across from him. So, not a coffee mug, but she needn’t have bothered – there’s a bowl already sitting out in the kitchen, after all, and another on a tray in Eddie’s room.

“Hey.”

_ Hey? _

Bev looks at the notes in her hands instead of at him. They reek of permanent marker; another moment passes in silence before she sighs and sets them down between them, beside the water, turned so Richie can read what’s written on them.

‘Yes’ and ‘No.’

_ Holy shit – Bev? _

“Alright,” she says, voice pitched low as she finally locks eyes with him, “Can you understand me?”

He’s spent so long wishing someone would notice him that he’d entirely forgotten how unnerving it is to be the subject of a look as scrutinizing as hers. It may not be an interrogation, but it feels like one, and he freezes for so long that Bev’s sharp look folds into something sadder. She starts to get up, and Richie panics.

_ Wait, shit – ‘Yes,’ look – ‘Yes!’ _

If his soft howl hadn’t stopped her in her tracks, his nails ripping right through the paper might have.

They stare each other down for several beats until Bev sits back down in stunned-silent slow motion. Richie wills her to ask him more,  _ anything,  _ and finally she says, “You’re not…  _ just  _ a dog.”

Richie shakes the mangled ‘Yes’ note off his paw and replaces it with ‘No’ while Bev’s eyes go on getting wider.

“Oh my god,” she breathes. “What – who”—She shakes her head and tells him to “wait there” while she goes back to the kitchen for the marker and a few more sticky notes. 

_ We could be here all night if I have to talk to you through a Post-it Ouija board –  _ but he’ll settle for that, what the hell? Talking is talking, and he’s had way too little of it for way too many months to be picky about  _ how  _ he does it, or even to complain about how tiny and barely-legible Bev’s letters are.

_ You forgot the ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye.’ _

“Do you have a name?”

Richie has a feeling she knows, but in the interest of avoiding a  _ Chucky- _ esque “serial-killer-possessing-the-body-of-my-friend’s-dog” scenario, he guesses it’s fair to make him say it first. 

Between his excited shaking and his tail going completely haywire, his stupid paw vibrates enough to shake the cobbled-together mat of paper as he starts to spell it – ‘R-I-C’—

“Richie,” Bev interrupts, whisper-soft. Richie stops to stare at her, and then he dips his head in a nod. 

_ “Our  _ Richie?” she repeats, but she doesn’t seem to need or expect an answer. “What happened? How – has it been you this entire time?”

Richie sets his paw back down on the crumpled ‘Yes,’ and then, ‘I-D-K.’

_ I’d tell you the whole story, but… _

“Does Eddie know?”

Richie is tempted to take the extra time to spell out ‘Of course not,’ but  _ No  _ gets the same meaning across. 

“I’ll go – you want him to know, right? You – Richie, I’m so sorry, you were trying even back then, and we didn’t”—

Richie cuts her off with a quiet  _ woof,  _ and she lets him write: ‘W-A-I-T’

God, but how does he explain  _ this?  _ Of course he wants Eddie to know. He wants to tell Eddie everything he  _ should  _ have said before he was done bleeding out, and now that he could – excruciatingly slowly, but he  _ could –  _ all he can think about is how selfish it would be. What happens if they can’t fix this and Richie’s hopes aren’t the only ones that wind up getting dashed? Does he have the right to put Eddie through losing him again in six or seven years, tops? 

He couldn’t bring himself to play dumb about this, but maybe he should have.

There’s no quick and easy way to spell out “I think I’m more useful to him as a dog that loves him unconditionally than I am as a friend who can’t say it,” or “I know he’d be pissed at me for even thinking this but I don’t want to be another fucking weight on his shoulders, Bev, he’s already having a hard enough time without also convincing himself it’s his fault I’m like this.”

“What’s wrong? Richie?”

Richie touches the ‘No’ once, then spells out ‘P-L-E’—

“Please… don’t?”

As much as she looks like she wants to hit him with a dozen more questions, he’s grateful that she doesn’t. His leg is already starting to ache a little, held at an unnatural angle while he balances on the other three. Better make this quick. 

‘M-I-K-E-O-N-L-Y’ 

“Only… just Mike? I don’t think he can keep a secret as well as I”—

They both jump when another door clicks open –  _ definitely  _ Eddie’s, this time. Beverly is almost as quick as Richie is to snap up as many of the Post-it notes as possible, although while she’s lucky enough to have hands to do it with, Richie has nowhere to put them but his mouth.

_ Think fast! _

“Bev?” Eddie calls blearily when he sees them there, huddled together over a slobber-strewn mess of paper with matching deer-in-headlights looks. “Oh… there he is.”

“Couldn’t sleep?” Beverly guesses. Richie’s impressed by how well she sells the casual sympathy, but then – there had to be a reason she was up to begin with, too.

“Yeah, it’s kinda hard to sleep with someone whispering in the other room,” Eddie says, at worst a little exasperated. “What are you doing, anyway? Wait – is that paper?”

Beverly smiles; it falters a little when Eddie comes over and orders Richie to “drop it” – which he does, right into Eddie’s waiting palm.

While Richie gives him his approximation of a smug look, Eddie grimaces and says, “Don’t let him eat shit like this, Bev, it could hurt his stomach.”

_ Aw, it’s just a little ruff-age. _

“My bad,” Beverly laughs; it sounds completely genuine. “Just trying a little late-night science experiment.”

Eddie stares at her while Richie playfully grabs another note by one corner and drops it into Eddie’s still-open hand.

Beverly continues completely unruffled. “Yeah, I thought since you’re always talking about how smart he is, maybe we could teach him to read.”

_ Hah – good one.  _ He’d attempt a high-five if he weren’t hyper-aware of how suspicious  _ that  _ would look to Eddie, who raises an eyebrow at both of them and says, “I don’t think it worked.”

“Well, it’s only lesson one.”

One corner of Eddie’s mouth quirks up. “Uh-huh, why don’t we just combine the sewing with reading lessons for my dog?”

Beverly wrinkles her nose. “I think maybe this is a sign I’m not cut out for teaching.”

“I dunno,” Eddie shrugs and gets up to throw away the bedraggled scraps of Richie’s first and only method of communication, “you’ve helped  _ me _ a lot.”

It should probably bother him more, having his first pseudo-conversation in months cut short, but Eddie smells like sweat and bad dreams, and there’s the slightest tremor moving the tips of his fingers until Richie nudges them with the tip of his nose, gives them something to do, playing with the soft fur around his ears.

He and Bev make brief eye contact after Eddie scoops him clean off the floor. Richie expects her to look – judgmental, maybe, disgusted or disapproving, but she just shoots him a pensive look and a wave that Eddie doesn’t see with his back turned, mid-retreat back to the relative safety of his room. Their room.

The room Richie shouldn’t be in, or shouldn’t have left.

“Night, Bev.”

“Good night,” she says, “to both of you.”

-*-

Richie makes his own thrilling discovery the following morning – nothing as earth-shaking as realizing your friend is your other friend’s dog, etc. etc., sure, but it turns out that the Uris household does, in fact, subscribe to the local paper, because, according to Patty, it’s important to support print media and “Stanley likes to pretend to read it some mornings.”

Now, the trouble with the whole “fetching the morning paper” movie montage thing is that it sort of hinges on the paper being stuck through a mail slot, and even Stan the Man isn’t old-fashioned enough to have one of those installed on a door that didn’t already have it.

Richie only actually finds the newspaper because Eddie spots it when he lets Richie out first thing in the morning and brings it into the foyer himself – careful not to look Richie in the eye when he sets it down in easy reach, lest he unfairly sway the results of his own experiment.

Naturally, Richie waits for breakfast to make a show of bringing the paper straight to Stanley. It’s wrapped in nasty-tasting plastic, lucky him.

For one glorious moment, he gets the three-fold satisfaction of being the center of uproariously amused attention, knowing that Bev knows he’s cheating his way to winning a bet for Eddie, and providing Eddie with a golden opportunity to clap once, loud, and go “I told you! I fucking told you he would!”

He can practically see the cogs turning in a few heads, then and after the walk he takes with Stan – not the excuse to steal a moment alone with Buddy that Richie expects it to be, but definitely an opportunity for Stanley to notice his suspicious silence, the better to avoid scaring off any of Stan’s birds. 

After all, Eddie  _ did _ guarantee that he could keep quiet if he had to: “You just have to tell him so, and look serious about it, he’ll get it.”

Richie can hear it now: “This dog is an alien that learned how to be a dog from watching movies. It’s a fucking Tommy Wiseau dog. Did anyone pack a blowtorch?”

He could just be imagining things, though, because the only person who makes any real attempt to corner him is Beverly.

Eddie is adorably reluctant to let her steal another walk out from under him, but anyone who knows Eddie knows he can’t possibly resist hanging around to help put the finishing touches on Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a wonder Mike hasn’t already claimed his own turn walking the dog, not that Bev gives the poor guy half a chance.

Frankly, he’ll need plenty of walks anyway to make up for missing so many of his and Eddie’s regular jogging sessions.

“So, I have more paper with me,” Beverly begins, tucking his disconnected leash into the pocket of her jacket, “but I’m hoping we can work with yes or no questions to start with.”

_ Easy.  _ Two barks.

“Can I assume that means okay?”

Two more barks. Richie has a system, after all; it’ll just get confusing if Bev tries to go with two barks for “no” instead of “yes.”

She gets it, clarifies just to be on the safe side, and starts off a long guessing game with one of many questions that deserve more complicated answers than Richie is equipped to provide.

“Are you afraid he’ll be upset with you?” When Richie doesn’t respond right away, she adds, “Eddie, I mean, when – if he finds out.”

_ He’ll have every fucking right to be,  _ Richie thinks. Scared, no, but not thrilled, either. He settles on a simple “No” for an answer, because he’s pretty sure he knows what she’s getting at, and that, of all the things he could be worried about, isn’t what’s keeping him from letting her spill the beans.

“Worried?”

_ Well, yeah. _

“You want to know if Mike has any ideas first,” she guesses.

_ Correctamundo, also.  _

She chews on that for a while, then looks at him with sad eyes and asks, “Are you okay?”

That answer comes pretty easy. He  _ is _ okay, mostly. The only way he could be doing better is if he weren’t a dog at all, but since he can’t say that and no one can guarantee it’ll even happen, the only response he can offer is  _ Yes. _

“And you’ll be okay, if we… you know?”

Richie stops walking to look at her. She looks back at him, and he can see her trying not to cry. 

_ If this is permanent, I’m kind of an asshole for putting that on you.  _

“No?”

Richie gives his head an awkward shake.  _ Well now if I say ‘yes’ you’ll think I mean ‘no.’ _

“If we can’t fix it… right away,” Beverly qualifies this time, apparently realizing the jam she’s put him in, “will you be okay? You’re… I don’t know, you like being with Eddie?”

_ Oh.  _ That’s an easy two barks, because absolutely, he does. Even when it’s hard.

“But you still wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

_ No. _

“For the record, Richie, I think Eddie would want to. I know I would, and Ben, Bill… everyone.”

_ Can’t exactly ask them.  _ Besides, he could only handle so much of being treated like a person despite not exactly  _ being  _ one before it just got sad.

Beverly sighs, taking his silence for stubbornness, and resumes walking. Richie falls into step beside her, content to wait for her to ask him whatever else she might still be wondering, if anything. 

Eventually, she says, “It’s a tough break, Trashmouth.”

He’d shrug if he could.  _ Could be worse, y’know, coulda come back as an insect. _

He almost misses the mischievous glint in her eye before she smiles at him. “How mad are you that you’re the shortest one now?”

_ At the risk of making a pun at my own expense – that’s a low blow. _

The “yes” he barks back kind of works, actually. It gets a laugh out of her, and that’s really the least Richie can do. 

“I’m dying for a full rundown on what that’s like,” she continues, “like… can you control your tail?”

_ Sure can.  _ He gives it a little wiggle for emphasis. Bev snorts. 

“Is everything actually black and white?”

_ No.  _ That’s another sore spot, frankly, but it would take him a long time to explain what the world actually looks like to him, let alone how much he hates worrying that he’ll forget how it’s  _ supposed  _ to look. If and when he ever gets out of this body, he’ll never use another sepia filter for as long as he lives.

“Do you actually like being petted?”

_ Hm – reluctant ‘yes.’ But only because I know you guys. _

Bev nods to herself. “That’s good… How often does Eddie bathe you to keep your fur that soft, anyway?” She presses the tips of her fingers to her lips and clears her throat. “Sorry. That must be kind of…”

_ He’s gonna kill me. _

_ “That  _ doesn’t bother you?”

_ ‘That’ as in Eddie ripping me a new one, or ‘that’ as in the biweekly spa sessions directly preceding the rippening?  _

Bev just frowns at him –  _ It would be fucking fantastic if you could just figure out how to read my mind, Bev –  _ but this answer is easy enough, too: one bark,  _ No.  _ As long as handling – pawing? – his own showers isn’t an option, he’d really rather it be Eddie than some nameless stranger at a grooming place. In fact, if Eddie ever tried to take him to one, he’d probably pitch a fit.

“And the costumes?”

_ Fuck no, those are great. You guys are naturals. You know, you better help me get Eddie to include a beard with the Santa hat for Christmas. _

The jolly red jacket, of course, goes without saying. 

“How about this, then? I’ll talk to Mike about this – keeping it as hypothetical as possible, alright? I’ll tell him if I have to, and in the meantime, you’ll be seeing me around, same as always. If you need anything, or… you know, just to talk, I’m there. You’ll – I’m glad you’re doing okay, Richie, but”—Richie sways gently into her legs, the closest he can get to good-naturedly elbowing her in the side.

_ Thanks, Bev. I feel better already. _

Bev’s smile hits a bump in the road, becomes another concentrated frown, and it’d be hard not to notice how she has to force herself to make eye contact with him. “Richie, I have to be honest about one thing now, so it doesn’t come as a surprise down the road.”

_ Ruh roh, Raggy,  _ Richie’s mind helpfully provides,  _ I got a bad feel about— _

“I don’t think I can keep this a secret indefinitely. A few months,  _ maybe,  _ but,” she sighs and lets herself look away, “it just… wouldn’t be fair.”

God, Richie wants to be mad at her for that, and maybe it’s for the best that he can’t impulsively spit out the first thought that pops into his head –  _ Fair to who, to me? I trusted you with this! –  _ because she’s probably right. Letting the dog out of the bag doesn’t seem fucking fair, either, but Bev should get to tell Ben, and Mike shouldn’t have to keep more heavy shit to himself on Richie’s account, and Eddie…

“You’ll have plenty of forewarning,” Bev continues. “And if things don’t work out with Eddie afterward, I can guarantee you won’t wind up alone – I mean, that’s the  _ point. _

“But you can’t tell me – there’s no way you haven’t noticed how hard everyone’s taking it. Eddie especially. It’s not your fault, Richie, but you have no idea how… I was so sure it was wishful thinking.”

Richie watches Bev rub the length of her arm through the plush, embroidered sleeve of her jacket. He watched her stitch that design into the fabric not even a month ago, just for something to do while Eddie worked his way through a bunch of seam ripping.

“We’d all rather have  _ dog  _ you than  _ no  _ you.”

_ Nah, Stan’s gonna think I’m a walking abomination. _

“No tongue-in-cheek bullshit, you know I’m right.”

Well, shucks. You could take that a step further and posit that basically  _ anyone  _ would rather have a dog, period, as opposed to no dog  _ or  _ to a famously unfunny comedian, but it also isn’t just  _ anyone _ setting tables with places for a missing friend – and, way over on the West Coast, maybe also a missing son.

Given that… given  _ everything,  _ it’s probably stupid to think that Eddie’s so attached to Buddy already that he’d honestly pick him over Richie. Buddy’s not real, anyway, he’s just Richie’s uncool special agent alias, his furry 007 persona through which he accomplishes nothing much. 

_ Alright, have it your way,  _ he thinks, forcing his gait to relax and his ears to perk back up. Still –  _ I guarantee it’ll be fun for basically no one. _

It’s probably just Bev’s way of trying to tempt him into agreeing, or agreeing  _ wholeheartedly,  _ but her gentle suggestion that they do the unorthodox thing and let Buddy have the open spot at the Thanksgiving dinner table makes Richie’s whole night – so there’s that. It’s not often that Richie gets to see Eddie more or less at eye level, and it’s even less often that he gets to see everyone else at all. All that’s missing is some velcro to strap some silverware to his paws, and he’d be set. 

Although – and this is a major oversight on Eddie’s part – a turkey costume wouldn’t have gone unappreciated, either.

-*-

Richie isn’t privy to Bev’s chat with Mike because it doesn’t happen until they’re all safe and sound in their relatively far-flung states, where Mike at least won’t have to worry about lying directly to anyone’s face. 

Richie doesn’t get the relief of having the outcome of that conversation delivered directly to his face for over two weeks thereafter, during which time he arrives at the pessimistic and completely correct conclusion that if that sure-fire quick fix he’s been so desperate for actually existed, they could have foregone all the clandestine spy shit and skipped right to the part where he has two thumbs and back problems.

He tries not to look  _ too  _ excited about his two-night stay at Bev and Ben’s place. After all, for Eddie, it’s a two-night stress-fest of last minute end-of-year work that managed to sneak up on him from behind dozens of other calendar dates, half of which were-slash-are divorce-related. It’s a shitty time to have to take a business trip.

Winding down or not, Bev’s divorce is going about as smoothly – which is… not  _ terribly, _ but not  _ fast,  _ either.

She just also happens to be making the most of a brief lull between what she refers to as a “cruise collection” and a much bigger fall show coming up in February – which seems impossibly out of season to Richie, almost as early as it is late for Halloween month, but what does he know about the wild world of fashion design? 

Just that Bev’s sure to knock ‘em dead with her new solo line, an opinion he tries to share with her using a quarter of the words. His dying breaths were more eloquent than his point-and-decipher talk is now, but Bev gets it.

“Aw, Rich. You’re right, though – I’ll blow them so far out of the water they won’t even remember Tom’s name.”

Richie gets her to reciprocate his high five on the third try – and that’s still smoother than the upgraded printer-paper “keyboard” they switched to after they finally had to admit that, no, Richie can’t do much with a real computer keyboard and his big ol’ clodhopping paws.

“So,” Bev begins, getting down to business, “Mike and I have been talking a lot – I don’t know if you can read this?”

_ If you’d hold it steadier…  _ All he can see before Bev turns her phone away again is some novel-length texts, which is either alarming or just very in-character for Mike.

She’s clearly trying to be diplomatic about the way she breaks it to him, beginning with, “The problem is, Mike knows just about everything there is to know about Derry and Pennywise, and he doesn’t  _ exactly  _ know how this is possible, either. It’s all just theories.”

Which means no solution—

“It can’t be a Deadlights thing –  _ I  _ know that. It’s… visions, not…”

_ Yeah, yeah, mind-body dualism, vivid hallucinations don’t usually make you metamorphose into animals,  _ and _ I think it’s against the rules of supernatural coma dreams to specifically tell me it can’t be a coma dream. Can’t be my subconscious, because I didn’t even  _ know _ half the shit about dogs I do now, and where the hell would all this be coming from, my subconscious? _

He could write a book on it. It’d take him the rest of his natural life and look like a toddler cobbled it together, but there’s gotta be a market for that kind of thing, right?

“We know…  _ It  _ could make you see things, even feel them, but something like this, if anything it could be an echo,” she says, her intonation implying she’s straight-up reading the latter half of her sentence from the screen in front of her. “But, Richie… there’s no mistaking what happened down there. I mean, do you – do you remember?”

_ Kinda hard to forget. _

“Specifically?” she prompts. 

Richie sighs pointedly. She shrugs apologetically and pushes the taped-together paper across the table, closer to him.

‘C-L-O-W-N-D-I-E-D,’ he spells while Beverly slowly repeats each word, a frustrating game of charades halfway through which Richie realizes that he wasn’t even awake for that, which means more torturously slow pointing – ‘F-A-I-N-T-E-D-B-E-F-O-R-E’—

“You didn’t just faint, Richie. We wouldn’t have left you behind, if there’d been any chance…”

‘S-O-K’ 

“‘It’s okay?’”

_ Well, it’s not like it comes as a surprise. _

Bev bites her lip and chooses not to answer him directly. Instead, she asks, “How did you get out?”

‘D-I-D-N-T’ 

“‘Didn’t’ – you didn’t? What’s that mean?”

‘F-O-R-E-S-T’

“What?”

_ Come on, throw me a bone, here, my stubby dog limbs are killing me… _

He winds up having to spell it out for her, and then of course she has to pause to pass it on to Mike. The general consensus between them is “Why would an evil clown hell-bent on revenge lovingly spirit you away to a nearby forest instead of just letting you wake up in a collapsed cave way underground?” –  _ Jinkies –  _ which Richie thinks warrants a rebuttal,  _ Why the fuck didn’t I land in the Townhouse with a little ‘Please look after this Richie’ note beside me, if whatever  _ did  _ do it is so benevolent? _

“And the rest is history,” Bev comments dryly when it seems that their macabre storytime is over and done with. “I’m sorry, Richie, I really wish I had good news. With no way of getting to where you were  _ before –  _ to your body, it’s hard to know if this is even  _ you –  _ I mean, you’re not hurt now, and injuries like that don’t disappear in a day.”

That would have been a real bummer, coming back as a dog with a hole still punched through him. Couldn’t have gotten help with  _ that. _

“Mike’s talked a lot about how important what you  _ believe  _ is, but”—she laughs humorlessly. “It’s kind of tricky putting that into practice in a situation like this. We were thinking, you go through the motions, act like nothing’s changed, and maybe that’ll flip a switch”— _ Sounds as hilarious as it would be depressing, got anything else?— _

“Or we can try a kiss?” She spreads her palms. “Honestly, that’s the best either of us could come up with.  _ For now.” _

_ Agh. Kinda hate to steal Eddie’s thunder, here, but there are several reasons that won’t work. _

Instead of “won’t work,” though, he says, “didn’t,” and then he waits in anxious silence for Bev to piece that one together. 

“You’ve tried it? With who – with Eddie?”

Woof woof.  _ If you’re gonna call me a creep about it, now’s your chance.  _

Beverly studies him for a long, painful moment, then props her chin on her hand and just says, “Yeah?”

Richie decides that’s his cue to hop down from his kitchen chair perch. His little-used dog bed is sitting where Eddie left it, wedged between the couch and the coffee table where it’s unlikely to wind up underfoot. Might as well take a nap, maybe try and get some answers from the dreams he probably should have thought to tell Bev about before he backed this conversation into a corner.

“Richie, wait – come on, talk to me.”

He growls at her instead. It only makes her stop for a moment, because of course he’s all bark, no bite – he wouldn’t dare.

Nevertheless, she doesn’t ask him any questions after that, so he doesn’t make a stink about her collecting her laptop to work on the other couch. The silence between them could be companionable if they didn’t both know that Richie’s holding something back; he still falls asleep despite the tension, eventually, and he spends quite a while in that other-dimensional dreamscape, trying to force the tatters of his semi-consciousness far enough to give his body a shape he can identify.

It doesn’t work until the sound of Bev’s laptop clicking shut wakes him with a start, and he comes flooding back into all five canine limbs. 

“Sweet dreams?”

_ No. _

Without the convenient excuse of unconsciousness to protect him, Richie’s sure he’s about to be grilled for more answers. But then he notices Ben’s scent coming from the kitchen, and the intentionally muffled clatter of measuring spoons, chopping boards – dinner stuff. Bev gives him an indecipherable little smile, shoves her laptop off her lap, and leaves it sitting there on the cushion.

Richie stays right where he is, trying hard not to listen to his friends trading design concepts and kisses in the other room.

He knows they won’t give up that easy, but if just “going through the motions” was enough to fix anything, Richie’s ghostly unfinished business wouldn’t consist almost entirely of wishing he’d spent more of the past several decades doing literally anything else.

-*-

Eddie and Bev – and, by extension, Ben – bow out of Christmas/Hanukkah planning so early that it never really gets beyond the vague early stages. Mike drops in to visit Bill, Eddie reluctantly third-wheels Ben and Bev’s first Christmas Eve together but adamantly refuses to “intrude” on the actual day, “Let’s just do something for New Year’s, I’m fine, yeah, I’m seriously fine, it’s not a big deal,” and gift exchanging mostly happens via snail mail and video calls.

The sewing machine Bev orders for Eddie comes early and with a complementary, mostly redundant walk-through of its various bells and whistles. Clearly there’s been some behind-the-scenes scheming about Eddie’s new hobby, because Bill, Stan and Mike all contribute their own share of supplies. 

Mike sends along two hefty boxes of fabrics he says he found at a little hole-in-the-wall fabric store on his way up for Thanksgiving. One for Bev, one for Eddie. Most of them come in colors Richie can’t make out, but the loud patterns strongly imply loud colors to match.

Bev makes him promise to send her the shop’s name and phone number. Eddie pets the fabric like he’s petting a sleeping dog – Richie would know. It’s only the way he gets all misty-eyed that makes it weird.

“Looks like the stuff Richie always liked.”

_ Not that I’m not a paragon of good taste, but he’s gonna think you hate it if you leave it at that. _

Mike doesn’t sound offended at all, though. “You could use it to make a shirt for him!”

He realizes his slip-up with enough of a delay to sound decidedly suspicious when he adds, “For Buddy!”

Eddie laughs. “Maybe Bev’ll let him walk the runway when it’s time for spring clothes again.”

If the fashion world values fun at all – and it’s got Bev, so it  _ must –  _ Richie thinks that might actually go over pretty well. He’s very good at the runway walk on four legs.

He’s also very good at using his dog body to express a jumble of emotions ranging from amusement to honest gratitude, a talent he gets to make full use of when Ben finally lets him see that surprise he’s been working on. 

It’s got  _ stairs,  _ two whole stories and a little room in the back with a hinged wall for ease of human access. 

In fact, it has hinges in several spots, so while its assembly remains a mystery to Richie, it’s somehow completely possible to fold the dog mansion down to transportable size – in theory, but Richie refuses to be coaxed off the roof after his initial exploration of the indoors.

It’s stuffed with plush blankets and pillows in blues and yellows. Bev confirms Richie’s sneaking suspicion about that when she meaningfully informs Eddie that “I did the inside. Tried to use colors Buddy can see.”

They look a little like a college football team’s color scheme, but whether that bothered Bev even slightly is anyone’s guess.

“And I kinda went overboard,” Ben says while Eddie is still staring open-mouthed at it, and them. “If it’s too big, we can always hang onto it here”—

_ Not if I cuff myself to this adorable porch! _

Eddie shakes his head. “No – I’m just, I’ve seen playhouses for  _ kids _ that weren’t as nice as this, Ben, it’s – both of you, thank you.” He only has to bend over slightly to press a kiss to Richie’s forehead. “And you love it, huh? Can you say ‘thank you’, too?”

Richie gives it his best go, very aware of Bev’s eyes on him all the while.

-*-

Richie knows something is up – the jig, maybe – when Eddie substitutes their Saturday morning jog for a short-lived game of tug-of-war that he doesn’t even  _ pretend  _ not to let Richie win.

Another opportunity to rock his matching jacket and shoes, gone. As long as there continues to be rock salt on all the sidewalks, there will be more chances to wear his snazzy protective footgear, but he’d really like it if that’d happen sooner than later, because what is Saturday but an opportunity to enjoy some real quality time with Eddie in the great outdoors?

Eddie Is Extra Worked Up About Something, Exhibit B: instead of just going out for a run like he normally does when he’s especially stressed, he starts pacing and just… doesn’t stop. Richie chases him back and forth for a while, but when that gets boring, he winds up perched atop his two-story fortress, instead. 

Eventually, and without stopping, Eddie wrenches his phone out of his pocket and starts a call.

A  _ group  _ call –  _ Now that’s a far cry from cornering me one-on-one.  _ Will no one ever do the fun thing and present poor Buddy with some paints and a canvas? 

Even on a Saturday, Eddie’s lucky he manages to get all five of the others to pick up with what Richie can only assume was no forewarning. 

The rest of Eddie’s lead-up consists of the following: “Hey, okay, so – I want to get this over with before the divorce is officially settled. One big piece of news at a time, right?”

He stops pacing to lock eyes with Richie, who stares back, stock-still and braced for, what, a fence post to the chest?

“I’m gay.”

_ Oh wow, Eds, all in one go? _

Eddie seems to suck in a slow, deep breath with the intent to hold it for as long as it takes any agonizing silences to swell back into a barrage of questions and exclamations – but since no silences ever come, it just becomes an immediate, heavy sigh. 

“That’s great, Eddie!”

“So you’re almost out of the tunnel now, too, huh?”

“Got anyone to tell us ab”—

“Nope, very single,” Eddie hurriedly interrupts. “Or – not legally until next week, but no. I just wanted you guys to know, now you know, and I  _ will  _ hang up if anyone tries to make a huge deal of it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Stan promises. “But thank you for trusting us enough to tell us.”

“Yeah, no big deal but while we’re on the subject, we all love you,” Mike says. 

While the others all offer their own one-sentence benedictions, Richie gets his  _ Yeah, all six of us  _ across by coming up to fold himself against Eddie’s calves.

Eddie snorts. “No big deal, but I love you, too. And congratulations, you all took it a lot better than my soon-to-be ex-wife.”

“Low bar,” Bev murmurs. Richie can practically hear the cogs turning in her head, but he knows she won’t say anything – to Eddie, definitely, but probably not to Richie, either. At least, not until that hazy not-quite-a-deadline arrives and it’s officially been too long  _ not  _ to get more people in on Richie’s dog conundrum. 

Maybe with some fresh ideas, a palette with paints in more shades than Richie can see – even a chance to tell Eddie how incredibly brave he is, to be that missing sixth man in the line-up of people who love the hell out of him.

No Losers Club group call ever ends quickly, of course, but when it eventually does come to a close, it leaves Eddie relaxed enough to actually enjoy the long walk he takes with Richie afterward. 

-*-

Eddie maintains a meticulous sleep schedule even on his off days – even follows all that no-fun-allowed medical advice about avoiding bright lights, screens, and alcohol after, like, ten – which doesn’t seem worth it to Richie even if it  _ does  _ seem to help him fall asleep and stay asleep without ever having to resort to the tried-and-true “go to bed when you physically can’t stay awake anymore” method. Nightmares aside.

He almost never lies awake like he does the night before his big court date, twisting and folding the covers in his hands. Richie can feel his eyes on him, even with his back turned. It’s not that he can’t or won’t sleep before Eddie – because why waste the absolute magic of being able to fall asleep anytime, anywhere, routine sleep patterns be damned? – but it’s a preference of his, sure.

Eventually, he rolls over and paws lazily at Eddie’s nearest arm. 

_ A little dog petting therapy never hurt, right?  _

Eddie sighs and obligingly buries his hand in the scruff of Richie’s neck, right between his shoulder blades. That’s prime real estate for scratching, but despite a token effort on Eddie’s part, it’s obvious his heart isn’t in it. 

Richie doesn’t mind. That’s been his new gig this winter – living space heater, handwarmer, hot-water bottle –  _ And you know what they say, Eds, cold hands, warm heart. Warm hands… warmer heart? _

Richie rests his paw there, right where Eddie’s heart is beating loud and steady in his chest, barely muffled by the blankets. Eddie squirms his hand out from under his pillow to give the paw a gentle squeeze.

_ Eat that, Human Richie. _ Dog Richie couldn’t be more confident about a little platonic cuddling. No carefully measuring the distance between himself and the guy he’s sharing a bed with, no sir. Just a lot of pathetically misplaced yearning for hands and fingers, same as every night. 

Oh, but he’s gonna miss this when Eddie  _ does _ eventually have someone to share a bed with. After all,  _ his  _ ship didn’t just sail – it’s fucking capsized, and he’s the dockyard dog standing on the pier, staring out at unbroken ocean day after day, pilfering bits of fish and looking after the comings and goings as best he can.

“I wish I could tell him, Bud.”

Eddie’s voice is slowed-down. Tired, too, but not the right kind of tired for sleep. “I wish I could show him I didn’t waste it.”

_ I’ve known that all along, Eds. _

“We should get you a yard,” Eddie sighs. His grip on Richie’s paw tightens, not enough to hurt. “A little place with a yard.”

_ C’mon, Eddie, don’t cry…  _

Eddie doesn’t listen to him, although he laughs, too, dry and humorless despite the tears. “He would’ve been such a fucking shithead about  _ that, _ but – but he – maybe – ugh.”

_ Alright, hey, even Human Richie knew how to be supportive sometimes. _

Whatever qualifier Eddie was thinking of tacking onto that, Richie doesn’t get to hear it. Instead, Eddie sits up to blow his nose – gross  _ and  _ inexplicably cute, not unlike Dog Richie, or dogs in general, and because he’s both a dog  _ and  _ Richie, he doesn’t mind at all that Eddie goes straight from that to wrapping him up in a loose, sort of uncomfortable, too-warm hug. 

It’d be downright unbearable if he weren’t still lying on top of the covers, with Eddie as tucked into them as he can be without letting go of his furry friend.

Richie is only hazily aware of Eddie’s gradual drifting off to sleep, because he drifts off at about the same time, all the while thinking to himself that it probably won’t be long before he has to wiggle free to cool himself off at the foot of the bed, and that maybe he  _ would _ poke fun at Eddie for house hunting just because it might make his pet dog marginally happier, just a little, but it’s nice, as long as he’s doing it for himself on some level, too.

His dream begins the same way it always has, whited out and silent as a grave. Richie never does a lot of thinking here. It – whatever “it” is – gives him so little to think  _ about. _

It’s only when the numbness starts to fade that his brain kicks into gear for the first time in the entire history of Buddy’s Dream Odyssey.

He realizes several things right off the bat – that he’s cold despite the tell-tale chafing of stiff, dusty fabric against him, that he can almost move his limbs the way you can almost remember a word on the tip of your tongue, and that he isn’t alone.

The light here is bizarre – white, but not just white. Also shadowless, featureless. Completely uniform. It’s a little like staring into the Deadlights; Richie can’t tell if his eyes are open or closed even as he becomes aware of big, dark eyes, a cat-like mouth and the faintest stirring in the air. Like there’s a big, slow fan somewhere pushing cranked-up AC chill into every corner of this space.

_ What is this, a big extraterrestrial refrigerator? Am I finally on tonight’s menu? _

There’s no answer forthcoming, but Richie is used to that. What he  _ isn’t  _ used to is suddenly feeling like he already knows the answer, like someone just beamed a vague “We mean you no harm, take us to your leader,”  _ Close Encounters  _ message straight into one of his cortexes… cortices?

It happens again, only with an air of finality about it: pride – no, satisfaction. Gratitude? 

This time, waking up feels more like falling asleep.

And into another dream – disjointed sounds and images, mostly. It could be his life flashing before his eyes, something like eight months overdue and filled to the brim with Eddie. Bev, Ben, Mike, Stan, Bill – and Eddie.

It’s a lot warmer, and quiet, and painless – except, of course, for when something collides with his chest and legs with enough force to send him scrambling backward, half-tangled in the sheets of Eddie’s bed while Eddie himself gasps and swears somewhere off to his right.

“What the f – what the  _ fuck,  _ what the fuck did you do to my – Buddy?  _ Buddy?” _

_ Obviously I’m right here,  _ Richie thinks. He tries to “say” something, too, but it comes out… weird. Like taking a sip of something, expecting it to be water, only to discover that it’s actually lemon-lime soda. It hurts his throat.

Eddie calls him again, and when Richie gets around to really focusing, he can  _ just  _ see him, too, a blurry shape stumbling through the dark to the light switch by the door. Richie’s vision whites out completely when it clicks on. Instinctively, he raises a paw to his face.

Except the paw is a hand – a very dirty, very human hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun author facts: You wouldn't know it from reading my It fics, but I'm really more of a cat person!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the last chapter! But first, please enjoy [this incredibly cute art of Eddie and dog!Richie](https://fluffifullness.tumblr.com/post/622644125148282880/i-really-like-the-fic-you-aint-nothing-but-a) by [itsybitsybatsyspider](https://itsybitsybatsyspider.tumblr.com/)!

Richie and Eddie freeze in unison – Eddie with his back to the wall, Richie half-propped up with one arm squashed underneath him and the other outstretched more or less in Eddie’s direction. He doesn’t trust himself to move.

He can’t  _ begin  _ to read Eddie’s expression; his face is so out of focus that he might as well not have one. He can’t hear his heart thudding in his chest from halfway across the room, either, or smell adrenaline pumping through him. But he  _ can _ hear his breath coming fast and sticking in his throat. He can hear how his shaky grip on the doorknob makes it rattle ever so slightly.

“Eds,” he tries to say. It comes out so hoarse that it’s barely recognizable as  _ words,  _ let alone as his voice.

That would scare him more if he hadn’t already recognized the sleeve of his leather jacket, dirt-crusted nails and, when he finally has the presence of mind to feel around and chance a quick glance at the ruin of his chest – mangled fabric with stains so thick and dark you might not know they were blood if it weren’t for the slight reddish cast to the brown.

As re-introductions to the world of full color go, that might be the worst. Eddie’s low whine makes perfect sense in light of Richie’s horror-movie get-up.

Behind the layers of ruined fabric, though, there’s just a long, puckered scar.

“Oh, fuck,” Eddie groans. “Fuck, fuck, fuck”—

“Did you try”— _ pinching yourself?  _ He hears rather than sees Eddie flinch so hard that his body thuds against the doorframe.

Gingerly, Richie drags himself upright and forces himself to stop squinting at the blurry shape standing across from him. Eddie’s still muttering to himself, his breath hitching as he tries to talk himself down from a hallucination. It’s like Richie’s ears are stuffed with cotton; he can only pick out phrases: “can’t be,” “fucking move,” and “has to be here.”

Richie’s voice sounds marginally better if he stops trying to force it to be louder than a whisper. It cracks less, too. “Eddie, call Bev.”

“Fuck  _ that,”  _ Eddie hisses. Richie realizes belatedly that he’s sitting within arm’s reach of Eddie’s phone, and that has to look a lot like an attempt to lure him in for a quick bite, Big Bad Wolf-style. 

“Okay,” Richie says, but the ‘O’ is mostly silent: “‘Kay.”

His clumsy efforts to move back toward the opposite edge of the bed probably don’t make him look  _ less  _ like an eldritch horror.  _ Déjà vu _ – all that’s missing is Bev and her coat rack, although he wouldn’t put it past Eddie to brain him with the lamp he keeps on the bedside table.

_ Guess that’s a chance I’ll have to take. _

Eddie hesitates a moment longer, then lunges for his phone so abruptly that it’s Richie who flinches, this time. 

_ That _ seems to give Eddie some pause before he backs toward the door again and makes a call Richie can just  _ barely  _ hear ringing if he really strains to catch it.

It’s frustratingly hard to decipher whether Eddie starts audibly crying before or after Bev picks up. Between that and his ragged breathing, it takes him a minute to piece together a sentence. 

“Bev, he – I – there’s something wrong, Buddy’s gone and I – no, he’s just  _ gone,  _ he never just vanishes like”—

“Actually,” Richie tries to interject, but Eddie’s going full steam ahead. Bev sounds like she’s talking slower on the other end of the line – slow _ er,  _ but not slow _ ly.  _

“I mean he was here when I went to bed and now he isn’t, obviously – no, that’s not – because I’m seeing  _ Richie,  _ okay, he – it – he told me to call you, he’s not moving, he’s just – what do you  _ mean,  _ no, I’m not getting anywhere near –  _ because it’s Richie,  _ Bev!”

“Yeah,” Richie says, clearing his throat once to little avail, “and I still don’t bite.”

“Did you hear that?” Eddie demands. His shoulders sag in response to whatever Bev says – an unsurprising negative, probably. Richie’s impressed Eddie can hear him at all from where he’s standing.

Inching closer to the bed, Eddie says, “Okay, but,” and Richie can more or less tell he’s being fixed with a sharp look, “If I die it’s your fault.”

A laugh pushes its way past Richie’s lips. Eddie freezes again with one knee braced on the mattress, then lowers the phone from his ear and fiddles with the screen for a moment.

“What about that?”

With an electronic crackle and a soft, staticky breath, Bev’s voice finally comes through loud and clear. “Yeah, I heard. Richie…?”

Richie’s throat suddenly feels tight – an alien sensation after so many months without any threat of tears. It comes as such a relief that he hardly bothers blinking them back.

“Hi.”

“Are you okay?”

Richie looks at Eddie, and at the phone in Eddie’s trembling hand, and decides he can risk scooting a little closer. The fact that Eddie doesn’t immediately make a run for it must be a good sign.

“Yeah, my voice box is just – kinda rusty.”  _ All that smoking I did in my youth finally caught up with me, huh? Bet I can do a mean Tom Waits, so – worth it? _

Jesus, he could just come right out and say all that. He opens his mouth to try, but stops when Eddie drops his phone onto the covers between them and catches him by the wrist.

Human body, dog brain – instead of startling back, he lets Eddie turn his hand over and over in his own. He has to have noticed how filthy it is, never mind all the unwashed grime still clinging to the rest of him, but that seems to be the only thing he’s completely unfazed by.

Richie’s pulse quickens when Eddie tries to find it with the pads of two fingers pressed to his wrist. It isn’t exactly like he hasn’t been touched in months, but his body seems pretty determined to react like that’s the case.

“Eddie? It’s okay, he’s not going to hurt you, I promise”—

“What’s going on?”

“I was your dog,” Richie blurts. He can see Eddie staring at him, but how much of his blurry wide eyes is an actual expression and not just the way his face always looks isn’t a judgment Richie’s god-awful human eyes can reasonably be expected to make. 

“Rich, you haven’t told him?”

“Accidentally skipped straight to scaring the shit out of him,” he rasps. He drops his gaze to his lap and says, “Sorry.”

Eddie lets go of Richie’s hand – tosses it aside, more like – and retrieves the phone from the rumpled mess of the covers.

“Look, this isn’t funny to me,” he practically snarls into the receiver. “I don’t – we left him, Bev, and even if he  _ had  _ been fine, which he  _ wasn’t,  _ no one, literally  _ no one  _ could’ve climbed back out of that mess!”

He sounds so broken up that Richie unthinkingly leans forward to rest a hand on his knee. This time, he does jerk away. 

“If I need a psychiatrist, just say so, don’t let me sit here fucking talking to thin air.”

Richie is still fumbling for a decent explanation – proof, he needs some kind of proof – when Bev says, “Remember when we were at Stan’s, and you found me ‘teaching Buddy to read?’ That was the first time I talked to him.”

“That was like… five months ago,” Eddie says, breathless again. “That doesn’t make sense, you – you would have told me.”

“Yeah, she would,” Richie interrupts in a rush. “My fault. I’m the one who wanted to keep it secret – temporarily! Because I didn’t know this would happ”—he coughs, a weak attempt at clearing his throat when his voice starts to fail him again. Where’s a good bowl of water when you need one?

Already in Eddie’s hand, apparently. Has to be the cup o’ water he takes to bed nightly and only occasionally actually drinks from, not that that stops Richie from going, “Ooh, cooties,” when he takes the glass from him.

He feels like kind of an asshole for the way that makes Eddie’s breath hitch again. 

“It’s really you?”

Richie downs several gulps of water and manages to only spill a little all down the front of himself in the process. If no one else is gonna make fun of him for getting so used to lapping water like a dog that he can’t sip from a glass without sounding like a horse at a trough, he’s gonna have to do it himself – later, though.

For now, he focuses on trying to make his smile look marginally less deranged. “It’s really me.”

_ “You’re  _ Buddy?” Eddie repeats, taking the now-empty glass back from Richie and setting it back on the bedside table without so much as glancing in that direction.

“In the fur.” Richie turns his smile into a dumb grin, and then he counts off his fingers just for the thrill of using his hands. “Before you ask, let’s see… Yes, the whole time, I don’t know how… exactly, aaand it’s kind of like blinking – wags on its own but I figured out how to move it myself.”

He’s waiting for the metaphorical broom to sweep him out the front door. Maybe a well-deserved kick in the ass to go with it. But Eddie just leans in close enough that Richie can kinda sorta see his brow crinkle consideringly. He could be looking for lingering traces of whiskers, some extra fur peeking out from under the collar of Richie’s raggedy T-shirt or the pointy nubs of vanishing dog ears. 

“You mean the… his – your tail?”

“Yeah,” Richie snorts, “thehismy tail.”

Someone says something in the background of Eddie’s call, a sudden break in the loud, distorted getting-ready racket the speaker’s been picking up for the past several minutes – probably just a side-effect of Bev only setting the phone down intermittently to run water or tug on a zipper.

“Ben,” Beverly greets, “Come here, come here – listen.”

“Is that my cue?” Richie wonders. Eddie is still staring – at his face, at his chest, at his shoes leaving dirty smears on the bed. No one says anything else until Richie clears his throat again and adds, “Hey, Ben. Uh, thanks for the doghouse?”

“Who – Bev? Is that –  _ Richie?  _ When did you,” he pauses to laugh self-consciously, “uh, change back?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Richie laughs. “Just now. Aren’t you supposed to be asking where I’ve been or something?”

“With Eddie?” Ben says, confused.  _ Obviously, with Eddie.  _ “Isn’t he there?”

“He’s here,” Eddie mumbles. He sounds either breathless or exhausted, which could just mean he’s finally feeling the come-down from the adrenaline rush. 

“I only told him recently,” Bev explains. “Sorry, Richie.”

Honestly, Richie’s too amused by the unexpected revelation to worry much about Bev’s broken promise to give him some forewarning. “No,  _ I’m _ sorry, obviously I was way off-base assuming Benjamin here couldn’t lie to save his life.”

“I can keep a secret,” Ben tells him, a lot less defensive than he could have been. “For a little while.”

“Who else knew about this?” Eddie asks with some trepidation, like he’s afraid to actually hear the answer.

“Mike,” Ben rushes to reassure him. “Just Mike.”

“Do you want us to come over there?” Bev offers. It would seem more hypothetical if she weren’t already in the process of getting ready to do just that. Richie pictures the two of them showing up in full hazmat suits to conduct some overdue pest removal, which is absurd but not all that far from the truth – gotta get rid of him  _ somehow. _

He looks to Eddie for an answer.  _ Your call, obviously. _

Eddie taps at his screen to light up the display, frowns, and says, “It’s not even six yet.”

“What time did you have to be in court?” Ben asks.

“Nine,” Richie helpfully supplies, just as Eddie retorts, “Obviously I’m not going.”

“Huh?”

Eddie heaves a sigh and gestures at Richie with both hands, phone and all. “How the fuck can I, when you just rose from the fucking dead, and you look like you haven’t eaten anything in months, and you need – we need to get you a new pair of glasses, and – and  _ clothes,  _ and, oh, yeah, an  _ ambulance,  _ for starters”—

“I feel fine, Eds.”

“Yeah, but still! I”—

“Eddie, we can help with some of that,” Ben says.

“Don’t skip your court date,” Bev adds. “It’d be kind of tough to explain, wouldn’t it?”

“But”—

“No, she’s right. I’ve caused enough trouble for one morning,” Richie tells him. “I don’t mind getting out of your hair.”

“Well, what if I don’t want you to?” Eddie snaps. “I  _ just  _ got you back, and – anyway, that’s over two hours before I even have to  _ think  _ about leaving. I can handle getting you something to wear and eat, at the very fucking least.”

Richie’s first instinct is to make some wisecrack about Eddie’s wardrobe – or Buddy’s _ ,  _ tucked away in a dresser drawer reserved specifically for his growing collection of miniature accessories.

_ And are we talking human food or petty revenge on a plate?  _

“Well,” Richie starts.  _ Well, I did say ‘your call’ –  _ except, wait,  _ did  _ he? Jeez, it’s like engaging in pseudo-conversations that only  _ he _ was ever aware of worked a lot better when they weren’t actually a mutual occurrence.

“Well?” Eddie prompts, on-edge. Richie doesn’t think the blurred lines of his face look as impatient as he’s trying to sound. “I’m not holding you hostage, Richie.”

Making a very special effort to raise his voice for dramatic effect, Richie says, “Then what are those  _ ropes  _ for? And is that chloroform I smell?”

“Get a little closer and find out,” Eddie deadpans. 

Richie laughs. His voice protests the sudden volume spike by cracking embarrassingly, but his “thought you were dead” status continues to grant him immunity to being made fun of… for now.

That’s  _ two  _ grace periods that are sure to wind down on him sooner or later.

“Want a rain check?” Bev guesses.

“If you’d be so kind – oh, and if Eds is willing to lend me the shower. Can’t be worse than – than letting a dog use it, right?”

If the reminder dredges up any less charitable feelings in Eddie, he has a funny way of showing it, clapping Richie too gently on the arm after the call has ended and before he runs off to gather him up a pair of towels – “One for your hair, you caveman,” he says, shoving both of them into his hands – or onto them, really, spread flat on the bed for Richie to move them and quietly marvel at the sight of it.

Eddie pretends not to have noticed for as long as it takes Richie to pick the towels up and shimmy to the edge of the bed. The distance from there to the floor below has shrunk, but force of habit makes Richie pause like he’s preparing to jump, anyway. 

Then, Eddie says, “You’re not… dissociating or something, are you? Do you feel feverish at all?” He swallows thickly and goes a little raspy, himself. “Does that hurt?”

Richie puffs his chest out a little. “This little thing?”

Eddie’s feet are already on the ground, but he doesn’t get up. Richie’s fairly certain he’s glaring – or to put a more positive spin on it, staring  _ extra _ intensely – at the scene of the crime.

“Hey,” Richie says, mostly to get Eddie’s eyes on his face, instead. “Hasn’t hurt since I got it.” 

That’s kind of a lie, but “not even six yet” doesn’t seem like the right time to get into the outer space-ifics of his surreal dog interlude.

Eddie lets the matter drop just like that. “I’m gonna go fix breakfast. Got any requests?”

“Oh, shit,  _ yes,”  _ Richie beams. “Chocolate.”

Eddie  _ almost  _ laughs at that. “How about  _ real  _ food?”

“Garlic,” Richie lists off. “Avocado, onions, nuts, grapes – no, raisins –  _ oh,  _ and coffee.”

Eddie actually does laugh, this time. He pulled it down at some point long after he’d already thoroughly memorized it, but there was a period of two or three months where he kept a meticulously laminated chart stuck to the fridge. On the left side, there was a list with pictures of foods Richie could safely eat, in the middle a shorter list of foods that were okay in moderation, and on the right, the forbidden fruits – only a few of which were actually fruits.

Naturally, that’s the only column Richie ever bothered to memorize.

Eddie promises to see what he can do,  _ doesn’t  _ comment on how Richie must be trying to recreate Buddy’s dog breath, and then continues to linger there until Richie resolves to actually get up. 

Good thing, too, because he never achieves enough balance for it to count as losing it.

Eddie’s hands closing around his upper arm and waist may keep him upright, but the sudden proximity is dizzying enough without the blood gushing to his head. He blinks at Eddie’s wide, concerned eyes, the shadows underneath a little darker than usual, and purpler. His lips are pink and slightly parted. Richie thinks those are just about the prettiest colors he’s seen all year. 

“Rich?”

Richie remembers to look at Eddie’s eyes, decides that’s no good, either, and settles on his own hands, again, braced against Eddie’s shoulders.

“Kinda feel like I’m on stilts,” he says. “Whew.”

Eddie insists on helping him to the bathroom, baby steps, and when he leaves to rescue the towels from the floor, he also returns with flannel pajama pants and a T-shirt – clothes Richie rarely sees him actually wear, even to bed, because everything Eddie likes fits him like a glove and wouldn’t fit Richie at all.

“There’s extra toothbrushes and shaving stuff in the…” He watches Richie pull open the little drawer beside the sink, keeping his other hand and most of his weight propped on the counter. “Right, I guess you know.”

“Yup,” Richie says. “Thanks, Eds. I see what you mean by caveman. Get a load of this beard, huh?” He gestures at his out-of-focus reflection in the mirror before bringing his hand back to rub at the wiry hair. “Gnarly.”

“Yeah, I thought some homeless guy scaled the wall and climbed in my window,” Eddie says, arms crossed on his chest. Richie snorts, but he feels a little extra guilty now that he has an even better idea of how rough he looks. He’s lucky that Eddie recognized him at all, and that he didn’t immediately get the cops called on him.

Eddie sighs. “If you need help with anything, give me a call?”

“Sure,” Richie says. He waits for Eddie to pull the door shut before he inspects the damage, head to toe.

He fixes what he can; he can’t pull off long hair like he could in his twenties, pre-receding hairline, but barely-six-a.m. is also not the time to try his hand at hairdressing, so he settles for combing his hands through the still-damp strands, finishes stuffing himself into his borrowed clothes, retrieves the contents of his ruined wallet from the pocket of his ruined pants, leaves that by the sink and then follows his nose to the kitchen.

Directing his question to the Eddie-colored blob doing… something at the counter, Richie says, “How do I look?”

“Wobbly,” Eddie-blob decides after a moment’s awkward silence. Richie realizes he’s coming around to meet him when he doesn’t stop moving where Richie is pretty sure the edge of the counter is. For all the time he’s spent in this apartment, this pixelated, colorized, bird’s-eye view of it renders it unfamiliar, a little to the left of what he’s used to. Just like going home to Derry; everything’s smaller than he remembers it, and that’s saying something.

“Why don’t  _ you  _ try hopping around on one leg, it’s basically the same –  _ ah—!” _

Eddie makes a valiant effort to stop Richie’s fall but only actually manages to land a hand on his shoulder when he’s already down.

“Fuck,” he spits as the one hand on Richie’s shoulder becomes two gliding up either side of his neck, where the pads of Eddie’s fingers can graze the knobs of Richie’s spine. “Are you okay?”

Richie swallows effortfully and hopes Eddie doesn’t notice the shiver that runs up the length of him. Eddie’s hands come up to frame his face, tilt it so he’s making eye contact with him, and it’s only by some miracle that Richie remembers to say something back. “Now, this – this vantage point, I’m used to.”

“Are you dizzy? Have a headache? Anything like – anything out of the ordinary?”

“You mean other than being a dog for nine months?” Richie watches for Eddie’s predictable scowl so he can answer it with a grin. “I’m alright, just working out the growing pains. Help me up?” 

Eddie takes one of Richie’s lightly rug-burned hands in one of his, and there’s that déjà vu again. Richie has to glance down to reassure himself that there isn’t a little paw-sized shoe waiting in Eddie’s other hand.

He wants to lace their fingers together, too, but Eddie lets go before he can overcome any of his hesitation.

Eddie spots him all the way to the table and only seems to relax when Richie is seated with a full plate of food, hot coffee and a second glass of water in front of him. 

It smells  _ amazing.  _

And he’s  _ starving. _

“Do you know how long it’s been since you ate anything?” 

Richie talks around a mouthful of garlicky eggs with green onions, red bell peppers, mushrooms and cheese. It’s just shy of hot enough to burn the roof of his mouth. “Uhhh yeah like eleven hours ago.” But it feels like a lot longer.

Eddie doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. He hasn’t touched his own breakfast at all, except for the coffee. 

His chair creaks as he leans forward. Richie imagines the expression he assumes he’s making, pinched brows and narrowed lips. 

“Did I not feed him – you enough?”

Richie can’t help it; he laughs again. Of course he’s noticed how much weight he’s lost. It’s more obvious now without several layers of thicker clothes to disguise it, obvious enough that even someone who doesn’t know him might assume he’s been sick recently – which is nothing if not a perfect alibi, and besides that, it’s nowhere near as bad as he’d expect it to be after eight or nine months of lying completely motionless and eating nothing.

He  _ thinks  _ that’s what this body’s been up to while he was off galavanting about as Buddy Howly. 

“Eds,” he says, and straightens his leg under the table just to see if he can reach Eddie’s. He can; Eddie jumps a little when Richie uses his big toe to prod at his knee.

“Eddie, for what it’s worth, you’re an  _ angel  _ of a dog owner. If it’d been up to me I woulda accidentally poisoned myself in the first week – really! Or just starved! Anyone else, I definitely wouldn’t have had home-cooked meals all to myself.”

Eddie kicks him back, catching him in the shin with far too little force to actually hurt. Richie can hear a reluctant smile creeping into his voice. “I would’ve done more if I’d known it was you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, like Richie just issued him a challenge. “You know that. And you don’t get to make fun of me for it, you’re the worst fucking eavesdropper.”

“With ears like those,” Richie starts to say before he catches himself, twirls his fork in his hands and eventually comes up with a murmured apology, instead.

Eddie nudges him again. “Rich.” Just his name by itself, light like “Come on, now,” like “I’m not that mad about it yet.” Richie swallows his heart back down with another bite of scrambled egg. 

“My  _ point  _ was… supposed to be, I mean, don’t  _ starve  _ yourself, but take it easy, this stuff isn’t exactly easy on the stomach and I  _ will  _ call an ambulance if you start puking everywhere.”

“Worried I still got a little dog in me?”

“You’ve  _ always  _ had a little dog in you,” Eddie sighs. “Figures that’s what you’d be.”

“Woof,” Richie intones.

But where Eddie’s warning about the looming dangers of an upset stomach might have failed to keep Richie from eating his own weight in eggs and buttered toast, his diminished appetite succeeds. There’s still half a plate of food left when he’s forced to throw in the towel.

It’s definitely not for lack of enjoyment. Every bite tastes so good he could cry – almost does, in that sleepy emotional haze that comes with waking up too early to sit in a quiet place, savoring tiny sips of coffee and trading furtive looks over a table set for two.

He and Eddie push back their chairs at the same time, but of course Eddie’s quicker about actually getting up and collecting his dishes.

Richie refuses to relinquish his own, clutching them to himself like he would his rope toy in an attempt to incite a game of tug-of-war. “Now, correct me if my math is off, but I’m thinking I owe you a few hundred loads of clean dishes.”

Rather than immediately try to dissuade him, Eddie lets Richie take the lead back to the sink, only slipping ahead of him at the last possible moment. His fork clatters noisily against the empty plate when he goes to set it down, and then, because it’s Eddie, he eases Richie’s mini-tower of dishes out of his hands and belatedly  _ does  _ argue, a little.

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“How about a ‘thank you’ for the food?”

He elbows him and gets a two-for-one deal in return, a smile and a finger to the ribs.

“You’re welcome, and  _ fine. _ Dishwasher’s empty, no need to run it yet.”

Richie blinks at Eddie as he steps away to fiddle with the coffee maker. “You do want them hand-washed first, right?” He always cleans everything twice, doesn’t trust the machine to do it all for him but seems to like the extra-cleanliness of letting it work them over with water hotter than he can tolerate even with his goofy yellow rubber gloves.

Richie tugs said gloves on when he’s pretty sure Eddie isn’t watching, then makes a show of squeaking the sponge against the inside of one of their coffee mugs to regain his attention. The sound is nicely audible even over the steady drip of a fresh-brewing pot of bean juice.

“Cute,” Eddie remarks – dryly, but it still makes Richie’s chest flutter in a way it never did when the same compliment was directed at Buddy. Dogs are automatically cute, after all, but the same doesn’t usually apply to whatever you’d call the look Richie’s got going on now.  _ Might-as-well-have-been-in-a-coma-Chic. _

“What do you wear these for, anyway?”

“Dish soap is hard on skin. Coffee?”

Richie shakes his head and squints a little harder to catch Eddie’s “more for me” shrug as he tucks into his second cup. Fair enough – he’s running on a pretty major sleep deficit, staring down a big day that just got a  _ whole  _ lot bigger.

None of which is enough to quash all the curiosity Richie finally has the opportunity to properly satisfy. “But you never bother when you mess with your car.”

“That’s different,” Eddie says. “It’s more satisfying – and there  _ are  _ things you need gloves for, smart-ass.”

“Yellow kitchen gloves?” Richie grins. It’s highway robbery, not being able to see any of the finer details about the way Eddie’s propped himself up on the counter, practically draped on it, or the lines of his latest scowl. Richie just knows it’s there, like he knows Eddie keeps looking back at him whether he’s talking or not, turning away every time Richie makes unwitting eye contact.

“Actual work gloves, obviously. If you’re still looking for more to do with your hands”—Richie interrupts him with an impulsive wolf whistle that goes entirely ignored, save for a little extra hint of red on Eddie’s blurry cheeks— _ “in a day or two,  _ maybe I’ll show you.”

If Richie didn’t know better, he’d say that almost sounds like an invitation to stay. He does vaguely recall him and Ben having some exchange about trouble with Ben’s recently-purchased brand-spankin’-new car Eddie hates because of  _ course  _ it already has issues, what did you  _ expect.  _

“You got a guest bed that  _ isn’t  _ made for small-to-medium-sized mammals?” Richie ventures with a nervous little smile. He’s been taking his time with the dishes, but he’s down to nothing but silverware. No one has ever been as needlessly thorough about sudsing up an already-pristine fork. 

Eddie doesn’t answer, and doesn’t answer and doesn’t answer, until finally Richie stuffs the last fork into the silverware basket and says, “I actually still have my cards and stuff, they were in my pockets. Dunno if you even still have my phone, but if not I can always borrow yours and get a hotel – or Ben and”—

Eddie mutters something about a couch. Richie squeezes soap out of the sponge with enough force to briefly turn it into a solid, worm-like mass in his palm and says, “Huh?”

“I have a couch,” Eddie repeats, stiffly. “Sorry for not expecting to need a second bedroom.”

“Oh”—

“Does that sound okay? I won’t be – it’s fine if you’d rather go somewhere else, I can even help you reserve a place. If you wanna wait here for me, I’m hoping I can make it back around lunch. We can figure it out. If not…”

“You want me to stick around?” Richie asks, belaboring the point for the sake of his own sanity.

Eddie takes the sponge from him, sets it in its own little dish by the soap dispenser. Their arms brush; Richie leans into the touch like a tree growing in the direction of scarce sunlight, heedless of the skin-desiccating soapy water still dripping its way down the length of his gloves.

Eddie doesn’t seem to care, either, because he goes right for the hug without bothering to pull the rubber monstrosities off of him first.

“Do I want my best friend around,” Eddie breathes, sarcastic. “That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever…”

Richie pulls the gloves off behind Eddie’s back and tosses them onto the counter, where they make a gross, wet slapping noise on impact. That leaves his hands free to get as good a grip on Eddie as Eddie has on him,  _ without  _ leaving a trail of wet patches behind.

The only thing he can’t seem to get a grip on is himself. Lucky Eddie’s still got his nose buried in Richie’s shoulder and his eyes fixed somewhere over it.

“Rich?”

Richie sniffs, and Eddie doesn’t complain because  _ he  _ almost definitely  _ is _ leaving a wet spot or two on Richie’s awkwardly tight shirt.

“Ugh,” Richie laughs, “Get a load of this guy, crying over the color green.”

“Oh yeah,” Eddie realizes, letting Richie pull away to scrub at his face with the backs of his hands. “Color blindness.”

He kindly doesn’t point out how little green there is in his tastefully furnished apartment. 

“Yeah, I can see colors again!  _ Just  _ colors,” Richie adds, intentionally winking at the air a little to the left of where Eddie is actually standing. “And, jeez, actually hug back and shit.”

He may be imagining the way Eddie’s shoulders relax a little extra when he’s done silently laughing at Richie’s bad joke, probable grin smothered by the hand he holds in front of his face. It’s not much, but it’s still a hell of a lot more laughing than he ever did watching Richie online.

“I do still have your phone, by the way. Kinda stupid move to keep it – or not, I guess. It’s been dead for months, but assuming it starts – actually, I’ll leave my laptop with you, too, so either way you can make some calls while I’m out,” Eddie says significantly. “Come on, I’ll get you set up.”

“Ooh, the tough part,” Richie laments. “Can’t I just wait and show up at my own funeral? Pop into a nice Manhattan bar’s open mic?”

“I didn’t know you performed at  _ nice  _ bars.”

“Zing!” Richie laughs. “Funeral it is.”

Unsurprisingly, Eddie chooses not to dignify that with an answer, instead leaving Richie to finish tidying up – slowly, careful not to stub his toes on anything or trip over the open door of the dishwasher – while he flits about, collecting an assortment of mystery items Richie is pretty sure includes a few blankets, extra pillows – even a reusable water bottle that Richie eases out of his hands as soon as he’s done filling it up.

“I think that’ll hold me in my convalescence,” he teases. He follows Eddie back to the living room couch, where a dragon hoard of supplies is waiting. Eddie fluffs up one of the pillows, shakes out a blanket and then self-consciously refolds it as he speaks.

“Um, I was thinking we could have Ben and Bev over, you know, just in case.”

Richie doesn’t think there are any cases left to worry about, but as long as Eddie’s worrying anyway, it’s easy to humor him. If their positions were reversed, he’d be just as reluctant to leave Eddie all by his lonesome, and besides – he likes that “we.”  _ Does that make this ours? How many months’ worth of back-rent would that mean I owe you? _

Easy as barking meaningless noise in response, Richie grins, pulls Eddie onto the couch with him, blanket-first, and says, “Sure, to keep me company.”

Eddie pushes the blanket onto Richie’s lap and then pushes Richie until he scoots far enough over that Eddie isn’t squished between him and the arm of the couch. “You sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“I’m sure, but if you wanna livestream the whole ordeal, I guarantee I can make it at least thirty percent more entertaining.”

Eddie snorts. “You’re selling yourself short.”

“Thirty-one percent and up, I have to start charging.”

“Don’t I even get a discount?”

“Jeeeez,” Richie whines, “one second I’m selling myself short, next I’m overcharging?”

Eddie laughs, scoops the blanket off of Richie and shakes it out so he can tuck it back around his folded legs, either ignoring or honestly failing to notice how they twitch a little every time he doesn’t quite touch him. Richie’s heart is in his throat by the time Eddie passes him his phone, already plugged into a strategically-placed power strip with one of the absurdly long charging cords Eddie keeps handy. For good measure, he also points out the laptop on the table in front of him, open and unlocked. 

“I’m gonna go get ready,” Eddie says, dragging himself to his feet with obvious reluctance. “And strip the bed while I’m at it.”

Richie recognizes the attempt at granting him some privacy for what it is. He still offers to help, anyway, but Eddie is already waving him off. 

“If I can sit through a divorce trial first thing in the morning, you can get started on clearing up your missing persons case. Call your fucking parents, Rich, they have to be worried sick.”

“Yeah, probably,” Richie says, quiet and a little guilty, but still he doesn’t turn his attention to either device until he hears the crinkling of a plastic garbage bag from the bathroom, some light Clorox wipe scrubbing and, eventually, the shower starting. 

-*-

There’s a redheaded ambush waiting for Richie the second he answers the door.

If he hadn’t spent the past several minutes improving his balance as a byproduct of pacing the same worn stretches of carpet Eddie often does, Bev’s hug might’ve knocked him flat instead of just forcing him to take a step back with a short gasp and a startled laugh.

“Have a little mercy, you’re looking at the first little pig’s house of straw on two legs.” He squints at the apparently empty hallway behind her and adds, “Speaking of houses, where’s Benny Boy?”

“Sleeping off another late-night video conference,” Bev says, finally loosening her grip so she’s half-supporting Richie with one arm, half-letting him stumblingly lead her back to his nest on the couch – now complete with a conspicuously depleted box of tissues. “Probably not for long. And Eddie?”

“You just missed him. I feel kinda bad for any driver who happens to cross paths with him, the way he was bookin’ it.”

“That’s just New York,” Bev snorts. “Never a dull moment behind the wheel.”

“‘Specially not if it’s Eddie’s wheel,” Richie says. It comes just a little fonder than he meant it to, but Bev lets that slide.

She dodges Richie’s couch in favor of the virtually unused loveseat; Eddie may be an expert when it comes to buying and maintaining cars, but Richie is gonna have to have some words with him about buying furniture online based on appearance alone. The thing is awful. Stiff as a board. He tosses a couple spare pillows Bev’s way and wonders if he’s a bad host for silently reclaiming his original spot.

“And what about you?” she asks. “Have you noticed anything… different?”

“You shoulda seen my nails,” Richie says despite knowing full well that’s not what she means. “I was  _ basically  _ armed with ten – twenty letter openers. Budget Wolverine.”

“I’m sure Eddie loved that,” Bev chuckles. “What about your chest?”

“Love ya, Bevs, but I only show off my gaping chest hole on a second date.”

“Seriously?”

“Okay, third.”

“Richie.”

“It’s just a scar – well, two scars,” Richie amends with a grimace. He fiddles with the edge of his too-tight shirt, wary of how obvious they may or may not be through thin fabric. Can’t be too much worse than his ribs standing out a little more than is probably healthy. “Doesn’t hurt at all.  _ And  _ I haven’t been overcome with the desire to bark at any passing cars. So that’s probably a good sign.”

“I don’t know, that seems suspiciously out of character,” Bev jokes. “Maybe we should take you for a walk just to make sure.”

“That’ll turn a few heads,” Richie grins down at his clothes.

She hops up to join him, side-by-side, and doesn’t even have to fold herself in half or lift the computer to within an inch of her face to navigate to a fresh window. 

“God, I need glasses,” Richie complains.

“You can’t see this?” She gestures at the screen, and Richie shakes his head. “Wow. So much for a video call.”

“Oh, no, seeing is believing, et cetera,  _ I  _ just can’t see shit without giving the other person a really good view of my forehead. Not my best angle. I’ve already made it work with everyone but the Losers – and my optometrist.”

“I figured,” Beverly says.

“Yeah, thought I might need a little help convincing Mike, Bill and Stan I’m not a clown apparition laying a curse on them through the phone.” Since Bev doesn’t immediately do it, Richie takes it upon himself to add an exaggeratedly raspy,  _ “Seven days.” _

She generously offers him a pity laugh, but that’s fine; he knows Eds would’ve thought it was funny.

They start with Mike, because Mike already knows half of what’s up and should-probably- _ would  _ have known the “good news” part of it hours ago if it weren’t for that pesky New York-California time difference. 

Richie moves out of the frame before Mike picks up, predictably gravelly-voiced and from what Richie can make out, lit by nothing but his phone screen. 

“Ed – no, Bev? What’s going on?”

“There’s someone who’d like to talk to you,” Beverly says, plus a belated, “Everything’s okay, we’re just borrowing Eddie’s laptop.”

“Mikey? ‘S… ‘s that Bev?”

“Is  _ that  _ Bill?” Richie blurts before he remembers that this was ostensibly supposed to be a gentle reveal. “Talk about two birds, one stone.”

_ “Richie?” _

“Wh-what do you mean, ‘Richie’”—

Bev pushes the computer far enough away to put him back in the frame, presumably. It’s all vague impressions of shape and color to Richie; he can only more or less tell there are two faces filling most of the screen, a little orange now that someone’s flicked on a light. Context suggests they may be two  _ surprised  _ faces. Nothing like a phone call from a ghost to leave you wide awake and alert first thing in the morning. The only thing worse would be waking up cuddling one.

Speaking of cuddling – “You two”—

“You’re not a dog,” Bill interrupts.

“Ah,” Bev breathes, going for a pat on the shoulder ‘til she winds up just shaking Richie gently by the sleeve. Under her breath, she says, “Well, I guess that’s only fair.”

_ “Very  _ astute observation, Billiam,” Richie manages by way of response.  _ Jesus, it really is like everyone but Eds knew.  _ Eds and Stan, who inconveniently happen to be the hardest ones to tell a weird little secret like this.

“What did you do? What worked?” Mike sounds like he can’t decide whether to start crying immediately or break out a notebook first.

“Wished on a star,” Richie tells him. “Strategically planned the best possible time to scare Eddie half to death.”

Apparently no one’s interested in where and/or how Eddie’s doing, although it’s a fair bet they all at least remember where. Doesn’t take a genius to guess he must have been less than thrilled about having to go. 

All he misses is lots of crying and questions and hasty promises to fly out to New York for a reunion. No one asks if that means Richie will wind up flying back with them after, like it’s either an easy assumption or an obvious no-man’s land between discussing how Eddie took it and wondering about the bed Bill and Mike are clearly sharing.

Richie wouldn’t know what to say to any variation of “what’s next,” anyway – obviously, he’s gonna get his hands on some new glasses, sleep for thirteen hours, stare at Google image results for paint swatches so he can try to talk Eddie into buying the best colors for his walls, maybe lounge around eating Buddy’s weight in grapes, and then maybe –  _ maybe,  _ time will start moving again.

Stan has to take an impromptu “coffee” break to join their call, which only happens  _ after  _ three of them bombard him with texts insisting he look at his phone.

Richie wonders if Eddie’s like that at work, too, laser-focused to the exclusion of all else; it’s an enticing little mystery he never could have solved as a dog – and one he’d really like to now, preferably by crashing his office in person. 

One more for his short list of future plans, assuming Eddie’s still game by then.

Stan hangs up the second he sees their mystery fifth caller.

When he eventually answers one of their repeated attempts to get him to rejoin the group video call, he promptly opens with a panicked, “I still can’t get through to his phone.”

“Yeah, it’s disconnected,” Richie forces a grin, waving his glorified combination phone book-flashlight at the camera. “Something to do with all those months of unpaid bills.”

“What the  _ fuck.” _

“Miss me?”

Stan struggles to answer that long enough that Bill finally gives him an out. “It’s really him, Stan, it’s – he’s been around. He’s okay.”

“What do you mean, ‘around?’ How did you  _ get  _ there? And how could we have been wrong about…?”

“You weren’t,” Richie says. Bev places a feather-light hand on his upper arm, this time, and he sighs. “You weren’t wrong to leave me there. I knew you’d have to. I just didn’t know what’d happen after.”

Stan doesn’t respond to that, and no one else volunteers to do the explaining  _ for  _ him, so Richie is forced to make good on the implied promise of a story. The lie he’s been telling everyone else sounds just as stupid to Richie’s ears, but at least you can’t argue when someone tells you they’ve just woken up from a vague accident-induced coma.

“Okay, you know how a very handsome, very intelligent dog coincidentally showed up the day I kicked it? The bucket, I mean, not the dog.”

“Yeah, that’s Eddie’s dog. What does Buddy have to do with anything?”

“Well, you’ve never seen both of us in the same room at the same time,” Richie begins. Stan’s corner of the screen doesn’t move enough to imply the kind of hand-waving he’d expect from Eddie, but he gets interrupted just as fast.

“Stop, stop – seriously, Richie? You can’t be trying to convince me you came back as a dog. That’s awful – you guys aren’t just gonna let him do this now, are you?”

“That’d be in poor taste, even for me,” Bill says, kind of jokingly. Oh, how the times have changed in Richie’s absence; he’s got their fearless leader trying to lighten the mood, and he sucks at it.

“We’re here to help him do that,” Beverly explains. “Turns out we’re not very good at keeping secrets. You and Eddie were the only ones who didn’t know.”

“I’ve only known since…”

It’s Mike who finishes Bill’s sentence. “Three days ago.”

“Bev figured it out,” Richie says.

“In November,” Beverly adds, judiciously opting not to mention exactly where that went down. “I told Mike, Mike told Bill…”

“Where’s Ben?” Stan asks in a tone of voice that makes it clear he’s looking for the one remaining member of their group who wouldn’t let a bad joke overstay its welcome. 

“Sleeping,” Richie says. 

“On his way,” Bev corrects. She tilts her phone toward Richie, like there’s any chance he’ll be able to make out what it says. He hadn’t even noticed her texting.

“And Eddie?” Stan tries, a fraction of a second before he sighs and says, “Right, probably in court. Does he believe this? Does he  _ know?” _

“In the face of irrefutable evidence, yes,” Richie says. “You’re getting the ‘break it to me gently’ version, trust me.”

Stan doesn’t sound convinced. “How did it happen?”

“We don’t know,” Mike laments. “He just woke up like that, both times.”

“I saw a turtle,” Richie offers, and emphasizes, “A  _ weird  _ turtle.”

“I’m hanging up,” Stan announces, but he doesn’t. “Mike?”

“Beats me,” Mike says. “A turtle?”

“Yeah, the reason we don’t have straws in Cali?” Richie prompts with a helpless grin. “Anybody? No? Sorry, that’s all I got. Weird dreams.”

He doesn’t care how, really, or why. Never look a gift horse, turtle  _ or _ dog in the mouth, right? 

“So,” Stan finally wonders, filling a mulling-it-over kind of silence with a long sigh of happy resignation, “when are we planning to celebrate?”

-*-

It isn’t falling asleep in the middle of the day that surprises Richie; it’s waking up gradually after sleeping through the jingle of Eddie’s keys down the hall – or even just the cadence of his footsteps. Richie doesn’t open his eyes until he hears Eddie in the entryway, diligently untying the knots on his shoes instead of just yanking them off, tugging his jacket off and stowing it on one of the hooks he has mounted on the wall.

He barely has time to drag his way upright before Eddie comes bustling into the room, but then Eddie’s so quiet for so long that there’s no reason  _ not  _ to offer him a drowsy, “Hey, Eds.”

“H-hey,” Eddie says, “what the hell happened to your clothes?”

Richie isn’t sure until he surveys himself for a second and remembers,  _ Oh, right, costume change.  _ He must have dozed off almost as soon as he sat down to enjoy the relative comfort of a one-size-fits-all queen-sized sheet toga, but with Eddie already dropping himself onto the opposite end of the couch, right smack-dab between Richie and the bedroom, it’s a little late to change back into Eddie’s one-size-too-small clothes.

Instead he pretends to be modeling for a sculptor, real fancy marble bust style, and says, “Can’t let you and Bev have all the fun making clothes. I think I’m rocking it.”

“Yeah,” Bev agrees, “we’re gonna do a whole collection based on it.”

Eddie at least cracks a smile while he goes on staring at Richie; he’s still far enough away that Richie might not have noticed if he weren’t staring right back. Neither of them gives the staring much of a rest when Ben says “sheet ghost” around a big yawn, followed by a somewhat more coherent, “How’d things go on your end, Eddie?”

_ There you go beating me to it, dammit.  _ Richie would’ve thrown in an extra “what took you so long,” though. He was late even before Richie passed out.  _ But who’s counting? _

“Uh, yeah, it went… well,” Eddie says distractedly. “Just waiting to get a copy of the decree, so…”

Well,  _ that  _ deserves better than a tepid congratulations and a polite smile if it deserves anything at all. Stan might’ve been right about Buddy developing bad habits, but if all he’s picked up is a hair-trigger tendency to hug the living daylights out of his best friend, he’ll take that and run with it, hell yeah he will.

“That’s awesome, Eds!” he laughs into Eddie’s neatly-ironed ivory-white shoulder seam. “Free at last, huh?”

The way Eddie embraces him in turn, it almost doesn’t come as a surprise that he lets his hand linger afterward, a gentle pressure against Richie’s back, right over the knitted flesh just slightly to the right of his spine. Richie is privately grateful for the thicker fabric separating skin from ruined skin, but he wishes Eddie knew he wouldn’t shake him off if he wanted to move his hand – drop it to his waist, count shoulders, even go for some real “wandering hands.”

That’s a line of thought he knows better than to pursue with Ben and Bev still in the room, though, and what better way to distract himself than by distracting everyone else, too?

He narrates his way through firing up Eddie’s laptop. It must have fallen asleep right along with Richie, but the playlist he’d been in the middle of putting together is still there. 

“Ben and Bev were working, and you know how I like to feel included,” Richie teases. He lets the cursor linger over the play button and leans back away from the screen to get a better look at Eddie, instead. “Guess the theme!”

Thigh-to-thigh, Eddie’s finally close enough to Richie that he can see his smile in standard-definition again. He drags the laptop onto both their knees to take a look, snorts after scrolling through hours’ worth of varyingly dog-related songs and titles and finally clicks on one of them with a bemused frown.

_ “The skies are charcoal gray…” _

“Ah, a man of taste,” Richie laughs.

“What is this… the guy who did ‘Rock Lobster?’”

“Statement retracted, how do you not just  _ know  _ the B-52’s?”

Bev heads off their impending argument before it can even get underway. “Yeah, Eddie, it’s the same band.”

“I didn’t know it either,” Ben admits.

Richie shoots Eddie a look that’s meant to convey, approximately, “How’s it feel to be the same as the guy who probably still listens to New Kids on the Block in 2017?”

_ “Quiche… Quiche La Poodle, is her name…” _

Eddie rolls his eyes at him and laughs. “Now I get it.”

“Ohhh,  _ I _ get it, ‘Come on, Richie, that one’s not even about dogs,’ nice try,” Richie says with a confident grin. “I’ll have you know, I know every song on this list by heart.”

_ “That’s  _ a lie,” Bev rats.

Ben joins her, the traitor. “He started adding things by searching ‘dog’ about halfway through.”

_ Jeez, can’t trust anyone to keep a secret these days. _

Eddie elbows him, turns so Richie can feel his breath puff against his neck, just below his ear, and repeats, “Nice try.”

Richie shivers. He knows Eddie is staring at him, so he pretends not to notice and goes on frowning at their meddling friends. “You’re all banned from hearing my upcoming cat playlist.”

Eddie clicks ahead to a remastered version of “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.” No regard whatsoever for Richie’s attempt to give his musical hodgepodge some tonal consistency. “How’s that work, you’re using  _ my  _ Spotify”—

Richie throws up his hands in mock frustration. “I forgot my password!”

He hears Ben and Bev murmuring between themselves while Eddie reminds him that he has an algorithm to maintain, and does Richie even like half these songs, himself? Which is just plain disrespectful to say in the middle of this soft rock hit, a little easy listening romance never hurt anyone, and “I can’t believe you of all people aren’t into that”—

“…might be time for us to head out.”

Richie pauses. Maybe he shouldn’t have fallen so far out of the habit of listening; he’s too used to overhearing everything whether he wants to or not. “You’re leaving? Don’t you wanna celebrate Eddie’s thing?”

_ “My  _ thing?” Eddie repeats incredulously. “My thing, what about your thing? I just got a divorce – you – you  _ came back from the dead.” _

As far as Richie’s concerned, he’s been celebrating  _ that _ since he woke up. At the very least, since Eddie looked him in the eyes and asked if it was really him. But they’ve both gotten a new lease on life, so to speak, and it’s been so many months in the making either way.

“So we’ll make it a double celebration,” he suggests with some vague hand-waving. “I know it’s not a party without me, but it helps to have more than two people.”

“I’ve been monopolizing him for too long already, anyway,” Eddie adds. For once, Richie honestly can’t tell whether or not he’s trying to be funny. The way he says it implies Richie’s a real hot item. High demand for a few hours with a guy who never shuts up.

“We can always reconvene for dinner,” Ben suggests.

“In the meantime,” Bev adds, “if you don’t mind, Rich, you do need someone to go take care of the glasses situation, right?”

Richie proves her point by squinting at her. It’s not likely to help him see her any better, but it’s sure to get his confusion across… maybe.

There’s no way she wasn’t listening, or at least  _ half- _ listening, while he chatted with his optometrist; his frames only  _ looked  _ a little outdated; arranging to have fresh ones sent his way was relatively simple for a bureaucracy-laden put-you-on-hold-for-twenty-minutes ordeal, no need to physically go anywhere – in light of his ongoing recovery, of course.

“We’ll pick you out a spare,” Bev says decisively. “Since Eddie already got to do the really fun part, I at least want to do that.”

_ Fun part?  _ Richie glances at Eddie, but the only direct response he gets is a blush.

“It’s not that much,” he argues. 

“‘It?’”

Eddie sighs. “Got you some clothes.”

“Oh my god, me-sized polos?” Richie guesses. Without waiting for an answer, he throws a lazy salute Ben and Bev’s way and says, “Guess I’m covered, then. See if they have any that’ll make me look like a 1950s schoolteacher.”

His salute becomes a pantomime of dramatically cat-eyed frames. 

In the process of getting up to follow everyone to the door, he nearly suffers a tragic toga accident, narrowly avoided thanks to Ben and Eddie’s quick reflexes. Richie’s balance, like his voice, is almost normal at this point, but who can blame him for nearly cracking his head on the coffee table because he has sheets pooling around his feet? Ancient Rome must have been rife with tripping hazards.

Once they’re gone, Eddie follows Richie back from the door. Now that he’s spotted the hard-to-miss gaggle of bags, his curiosity about them must be sated before it eats him alive.

“What are you gonna do if they actually come back with glasses like that?”

“Wear them,” Richie says, kneeling. “Unless you were hoping I’d punch the lenses out and give ‘em to you.”

“Dick,” Eddie sighs, joining Richie on the floor and pulling out something bright, with a pattern… floral? 

“Oh shit, gimme,” Richie snatches it and unfolds it to find that it is, in fact,  _ not  _ a polo. Just a nice green-on-blue button-up that’s really toeing the line between business casual and Hawaiian shirt casual. “Aw, Eds, this is nice.”

He tugs it on over top of his sheets. The bulges where he’s tied knots in them make for an awkward fit, but other than that, it’s comfortable. It’s the right size. He breathes a sigh of relief and then mugs for a nonexistent camera. “How do I look?”

“Nice,” Eddie echoes. “Good.”

The rest of the clothes are just as good, if not better. Lots of color, shades Richie hopes he never takes for granted again. Every basic thing accounted for, like Eddie must have spent some time in that stuffy courtroom laying out a list of everything that Richie might conceivably need, from socks to a belt.

He has a feeling the impressive range of colors was probably intentional, too, but Eddie doesn’t mention it and Richie doesn’t ask. He does wonder, though, if he should consider measuring Eddie’s willingness to let him stay by how many days’ worth of clothing he brought him.

“There’s this, too,” Eddie says around the third or fourth time Richie is absolutely positive there can’t be anything left in the tumbleweed sea of emptied bags and stacked, folded clothes that he hasn’t already seen.

Eddie takes a nondescript black bag and plops it down unceremoniously in Richie’s lap. 

It’s heavy, stuffed with chocolates – bags of truffles; regular old gas station candy bars, the classics; dark chocolate infused with sea salt, chile peppers, orange zest; and even a few liquor-filled options. All that’s missing is a heart-shaped Valentine’s box, and that might just be because they’re out of season. If there had been one, Richie probably wouldn’t have been able to help crying.

As it is, anything he might’ve said sticks in his throat like he’s already swallowed a sweet or two, so it’s on Eddie to quit fidgeting and say, “You said you wanted chocolate, and I realized – I don’t know if you ever branched out, so it’s a little of everything. I don’t expect you to like _ all  _ of it”—

“Eddie, I  _ love  _ it,” Richie says. He means to say a lot more, like  _ It’s too much, Please tell me you took my card off the counter before you went and spent this much on me, Can I pay you back, I already didn’t know how to thank you for everything,  _ but all that slips out is a weepy, “Thank you.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says after a pause. “Good. I, uh – I just wanted to.”

They while away what’s left of the afternoon ruining their dinners with candy, talking about nothing and putting on a little fashion show that doubles as a way of making sure they don’t need to hit the malls of New York again today. They don’t; Richie has no idea how Eddie got everything right, even with Bev secretly comparing best-guess size estimates via text.

It’s more than just the fit, anyway. It’s the sensation of climbing back into his own skin every time he puts something on. Like Buddy’s little costumes times a hundred.

The only thing he’s missing is a suitcase, and generous invitation to stay notwithstanding, he still expects Eddie to offer him one right up until he starts clearing a space for Richie’s things in his own closet, instead.

When he notices Richie staring open-mouthed, he stops adjusting one of the button-ups on a hanger and clears his throat self-consciously.

“I’m not – they have to go somewhere, right? So they don’t get wrinkled.” His breath catches and he runs a frustrated hand through his hair. “Right, except we should wash them first. Who knows how many people have tried this stuff on already?”

“Considering we only have an hour ‘til we’re supposed to meet Ben and Bev – as in,  _ less  _ than an hour ‘til we’re supposed to leave…”

“Yeah, yeah, it can wait,” Eddie sighs. He goes quiet until Richie bends over to retrieve a pair of pants from the floor. 

“I still think it’s weird that you hang these up,” he says. “You know that’s what a dresser is for, right?”

“Yeah, if you want your pants to smell like dust and mothballs,” Eddie retorts, visibly relaxing and pressing a velvet-lined hanger into his hands. “Can you take care of this while I go change?”

Richie gives him another clumsy salute. “Yessir.”

He makes short work of that disproportionately satisfying task, then also makes sure to pocket the contents of his discarded wallet before they head out. His nose may be a lot less sensitive now, but he could swear the plastic cards all smell more like Clorox than they did this morning.

-*-

The restaurant is a lot swankier than Richie expected it to be, although in all fairness and considering that this leg of today’s journey was mostly Ben’s idea, he should have known better. Business casual might be pushing the dress code a little too far, to say nothing of a mullet that would’ve put Henry Bowers to shame, but who’s gonna say no to the best fashion designer in the city when she takes her disheveled friend by the hand and leads him inside, herself?

In the brief semi-private window that gives them, she bows her head and asks, “Did you guys have a talk?”

Richie keeps his eyes on the path in front of them and tries not to look as far out of his depth as he feels, half-blind on two feet and painfully aware of the possibility of being recognized pre-official press release. Not even recognized, just. Noticed. “Nah, we just sat and stared at each other for several hours.”

“Well,” Bev says lightly, “it’s none of my business, obviously, but should we be bailing you guys out? For tonight, I mean.”

Richie shakes his head and catches a glimpse of Eddie in his sleek red jacket, trailing along behind them with a Ben-shaped smear of color at his side. He has no idea if Eddie’s looking at him, too, but he smiles just in case. 

It’s easy enough to imagine him smiling back.

“Thanks, but I have a hot date with someone else’s couch tonight.”

-*-

“So,” Eddie yawns, sprawled across his awful loveseat and looking for all the world like he finds it as comfortable as his own bed. Richie watches him from his freshly-made couch-bed and oh-so-casually loosens his belt a couple notches to better accommodate his slowly-digesting three-course meal – what little of it isn’t calling to him from Eddie’s fridge, anyway. He could’ve paid for that feast himself and scored a real bargain – several meals for the price of… well, still plenty more than one, but even Stan would have to agree the math works out nice.

Eddie yawns a second time before he regains the thread of what he’d been about to say. “Wanna do something?”

“Sleep?”

He can hear the frown in Eddie’s answer. “We’re celebrating.”

“When did you get to be such a party animal?” Richie chuckles.

“I didn’t mean ‘let’s go clubbing right fucking now,’” Eddie says. “Isn’t there a movie you’ve been dying to watch? A – a conversation you wanna have? Wanna order a pizza just to order a pizza?”

Richie would love to know what kind of conversation  _ Eddie’s  _ apparently dying to have, or where in his digestive tract he plans to put this hypothetical pizza. “Not including making my stomach explode, I’m up for anything. I’m pretty used to going with the flow these days, so whatever you”—

Eddie sits up fast. “Yeah, but  _ that’s the issue,” _ he interrupts, brandishing at least one finger at Richie. Probably all five. “When was the last time you got to go, ‘Hey, today I feel like going for a coffee,’ or – or impulse buying shit”—

“Which you never do,” Richie notes.

“But  _ you _ probably do!”

“Oh yeah, you should see my place,” Richie grins. “It’s probably covered in police tape now – or is that just something I collected?” He waggles his eyebrows. “So hard to remember.”

Eddie does an impressive job of making it sound like he totally isn’t trying not to laugh. “Don’t change the subject.”

Richie swings his legs back onto the floor and beckons Eddie over. “Alright, alright, so you want me to pick something. Come help me find the remote, then.”

“It’s sitting right in front of you,” Eddie says, already getting up to hand it over. He pauses with it still clutched between them like a relay race baton and says, “Will you even be able to see the screen from here?”

“That’s why I have my seeing-eye Eddie.” Richie pats the freshly-vacated cushion beside him for emphasis. He waits for Eddie to sit down to add, “And I  _ am  _ making decisions” _ –some of which I still owe you better apologies for– _ “like being here.”

_ “After  _ I asked you to stay,” Eddie grouses. The TV starts up so silently that Richie wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for the flicker of light in front of them. He doesn’t bother turning to look at it, anyway.

“Well, one of us had to ask,” Richie says, throat suddenly tight, “and as far as invitations go, I was expecting something more along the lines of ‘go fuck yourself.’”

Eddie sounds hurt by the allegation. “Why?”

“Because you should’ve known about this months ago, obviously,” Richie sighs. “I lied. By omission.” Which is technically worse, because waltzing up to Eddie and going,  _ “Eddie, I’m sure your dog is totally normal and in no way connected to your dead friend” _ would have been as good as telling him the truth. 

“Okay, yeah, what was up with that?” Eddie asks. Richie hopes this wasn’t the only conversation he was looking to have, although on the plus side it’s the easier one.

“Too chickenshit to even let someone else be the bearer of bad news,” Richie mutters. He’s suddenly very interested in watching Eddie scroll an endless loop through his tiny selection of home-screen streaming apps. He can make out approximately nothing, but it’s a smooth-moving nothing, which is a nice change of pace for sure. “I didn’t really expect to be talking like this again, either.”

Eddie’s shoulder collides with his and then stays there, a cautious weight while Eddie says, “I know you keep saying you’re okay, but… I don’t think  _ I _ would be. Not right away. I don’t get how you’re so…”

“Annoying?”

“Gung-ho.”

Richie shrugs unevenly, lest he should send the unintended message that he  _ doesn’t  _ enjoy being Eddie’s makeshift pillow now just as much as he did when he was better suited for it.

“It’s funnier in hindsight. If I can figure out how to work being a dog into some new material, that’s original content  _ and  _ an audience in the bag. But just for the record, if I wake up tomorrow in Buddy’s body, I’m gonna have to chew up a few sneakers to vent.”

Eddie perks up again. “Yeah?” Richie doesn’t get why he’s so excited by the prospect of destroyed footwear until he goes on, “Bet your manager was more pissed than I was. Or… your agent?”

Richie laughs. “They all were, but at least now they’ve got something to work with until I drag my ass back there. Time to build a little extra anticipation for anyone who’s still wondering ‘what the hell?’”

Eddie’s bushy tail deflates awful fast. “You’ll have to go tear down that police tape eventually.”

“Ah, but consider this,” Richie says, throwing in a little Bela Lugosi for the hell of it, “free Halloween decorations… Oh shit, how about  _ Dracula?  _ It’s nice ‘n short!”

“A black and white movie?” He’s already searching it up, though.

They settle in to watch-slash-listen-to a tidy 72 minutes’ worth of vintage scares, although from the get-go it’s obvious Eddie isn’t going to last the full runtime, which means Richie has a teeny-tiny window to re-end the conversation in a way that’s marginally more satisfactory, hopefully for both of them.

In an ideal world, he’d probably admit that he’s technically  _ still _ lying by omission, but just the thought of it takes his breath clean away, so he settles for beating around the bush.

Eddie’s in the middle of grudgingly complimenting the painted backgrounds of Hollywood’s Transylvania when Richie finally cuts in.

“Hey, Eds.” He feels Eddie’s eyes on him and finally turns to meet them. They’re nice and close, so Richie can see his five o’clock shadow, dark lashes and a sleepy smile. “If I could do it all over, y’know,  _ post- _ getting sucked into the Deadlights, there’s not that much I’d change. ‘Specially not taking that bullet.”  _ For you  _ guiltily and inevitably implied.

Eddie’s expression tightens.

_ “I’d  _ change that,” he says.

A pang of something hits Richie like a wave. Fear, maybe. Guilt, love, awe. The finest-toothed comb in the world couldn’t sort all of that out neatly.

“I know.”

“So what  _ would  _ you change, then?”

“I should’ve known better than to assume you couldn’t handle knowing about me.” He pushes his hand through his hair. “Fuck, I  _ did  _ know better, I just… talked myself out of it anyway. I wanted to do the right thing, and it’s not like you can  _ un- _ tell someone something that might royally fuck their six stages of grief. I know I fucked up, and, uh, this is me apologizing, for whatever it’s worth.”

Eddie surprises him with a short laugh that sounds genuine enough, albeit still pretty drained. “It’s five stages. And I forgive you – for letting your dog brain fuck up your judgment.”

“Is that a new go-to excuse I hear?”

Eddie knocks his ankle against Richie’s. “Better not be. Seriously though, just don’t pull that shit ever again. Instead of worrying about ‘doing right by me,’” he says, scare quotes and all, “try being an asshole next time, see if that works.”

“One – wish I could say that’s the first time anyone’s asked me to be  _ more  _ of a dick, but I  _ am  _ a comedian”—Eddie snorts softly—“and two – I’m gonna go ahead and promise, but I  _ really  _ don’t want there to be any ‘next time.’”

Eddie yawns again, longer this time. “Hear, hear. I’m gonna hold you to that.”

He’s as careful about letting his head drop to Richie’s shoulder as he was about leaning into him in the first place, but he stays that way long after he’s grumbled a complaint about Richie’s chin putting a dent in the top of his head – the only silent okay Richie can think to give him with his heart fluttering away in his ribcage.

His second go at deciphering what’s going on on the screen in front of him winds up being more successful when he just closes his eyes and listens – to Eddie’s narration, for the short while that it persists, and then to a sort of radio-broadcast version of a simple 1930s monster movie plot. He’s seen it before, anyway.

He’s never in any danger of falling asleep, not with Eddie breathing slow and deep against him. Eddie mumbles something incoherent and vaguely annoyed when Richie shifts so they’re both… not quite horizontal, but at least a few degrees more diagonal against the cushions.

He seems pretty content to wake up like that when Richie ultimately decides he’s let the moment stretch long enough past the end of the movie.

_ Next time I’ll pick something longer. _

Eddie plays it like he just changed his mind, bleary-eyed and tousle-haired with the TV already powered down in a now mostly-dark apartment. Richie doubts that Eddie ever had any intention of letting him take the couch to begin with, the sneak.

His excuse is that since he’s already been sleeping on it for the past forty minutes, the only way Richie’s stealing anyone’s bed is if he doesn’t march his ass into the bedroom and leave Eddie in peace. Richie tries to argue his way out of it – he’s been a dog for so long he could stand to sleep on the  _ floor, _ for fuck’s sake – but Eddie isn’t having it, and they’re both too worn out for a wrestling match in the middle of the living room  _ and  _ the middle of the night. So, after a slog through a bedtime routine, Richie tucks himself into bed and reluctantly watches Eddie slip back through the door to the hallway. 

“Night, Richie.”

Richie takes too long fumbling to turn off the lamp on the bedside table. By the time he responds with his own drowsy goodnight, he’s not sure Eddie’s still there to hear it.

-*-

Richie sleeps for a little while in a bed that smells like Eddie’s favorite laundry detergent, but the silence gets to him. Alone in a dark room, there’s nothing left to distract him from his muffled senses. He keeps forcing his eyes open to inspect his fingers or stare at the ceiling while he plants his palm against his chest, under the super-soft T-shirt Eddie bought him, and convinces himself there’s a regular amount of hair there – everywhere but directly over his scar, anyway. The scar is an elongated crop circle on his chest, an unfamiliar new feature in an otherwise familiar body.

He knows right where to find one more familiar thing, though, and it’s easy enough to go from telling himself he’s only getting up for a glass of water to lingering behind the couch on his way to the kitchen.

“You awake?”

It’s a good thing he’s so practiced at keeping his voice extra low – he doesn’t get a response. Not even another vaguely perturbed sigh. All he can make out of Eddie is his hair, and only because it contrasts so sharply with the white of his pillow. 

Because he’s learned nothing from past bad experiences, Richie sneaks around to the front of the couch, and because it’s marginally creepier to just stand there, he winds up kneeling with his back to the coffee table and his eyes on Eddie’s face. It’s out of focus even at close range, barely lit by a distant streetlight glow filtering in from behind the living room curtains. Orange, with a little touch of blue courtesy of the TV’s resting display light.

Eddie may have been on to something with his insistence that no one over the age of twenty… twenty-something can sleep curled up on the floor without suffering the consequences. Richie gets stiff and achy in what feels like no time, and to top it off, he’s cold. That fur coat really did something for him.

At least he can do something about one of those things without getting up to resume his anxious vigil alone in Eddie’s bedroom. It’s risky, but Richie’s judgment is still fogged by a very human haze of anxiety. He’ll get up and go when it’s leveled off enough for sleep.

Luckily, Eddie somehow managed to fall asleep without tossing any arms or legs over the edge of the cushions, so it’s not even that hard for Richie to find a spot to prop one shoulder on for softer support. His new position lends him the space he needs to stretch his legs out parallel to the furniture. 

It’s almost comfortable, once he’s settled. 

Richie is so sure he can count on his own paranoid fear of Eddie waking up to keep him perfectly alert, but the hypnotic rhythm of Eddie’s breathing, barely-audible snoring and  _ just  _ a touch of teeth grinding proves to be a more effective balm for his nerves than he expected.

Next thing he knows, there’s a hand on his head, petting him a little rougher than he’s used to, and he’s blinking awake to the tune of Eddie’s bleary, “Buh… Rich?”

_ So long, serenity, you were nice while you lasted. _

Eddie frees his fingers from the mess of Richie’s bedhead and in the span of a fraction of a second finds his ears, open mouth, bobbing Adam’s apple and tensing shoulders, one of which he grabs and one of which he follows down to the hand Richie doesn’t remember laying down on the couch beside Eddie.

The only reason Richie doesn’t immediately drop it back to his lap is that Eddie grabs and holds it, not tight enough to keep it there but like he assumed Richie wouldn’t be trying to pull away to begin with.

“Richie. It’s still dark. What’s wrong?”

_ Your voice is really nice when it’s all deep like that.  _ Should he just run back to the bed he’s supposed to be asleep in and hope Eddie chalks the whole thing up to a particularly vivid dream? 

Not with Eddie letting go to shove the covers off himself, and not as alarmed as he sounds the third time he says Richie’s name.

“Nothing, I’m good,” Richie makes himself answer, and then he groans. His legs feel like lead weights with an electric current running through them. And his back hurts. “Didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“But what are you doing out here?”

Richie yawns. “Getting water.”

He looks up at Eddie just in time to catch a bundled-up comforter to the face. By the time he peels it off his head, Eddie’s slid down to sit cross-legged beside him. He gets Richie to lean off the couch so he can tuck one half the comforter around Richie’s shoulders, and the other half around his own.

Eddie’s voice still has that underwater quality people’s voices always have when you’re just waking up or just falling asleep. 

“How’s that going?” When Richie just gives him a clueless look, he clarifies, “Water?”

“Oh, yeah, I was hoping someone mighta put a bowl out for me. No luck.” All Eddie offers in answer is a short hum. He sure calmed down fast; maybe the retreat-and-blame-it-on-a-dream plan isn’t entirely off the table yet. If only Richie had the heart – or the desire – to throw off a blanket Eddie tucked around him himself. 

This is ridiculous. “Eds, can I bug you for a little while?”

He’s prepared to get a longsuffering “go to sleep, Richie” in response, or maybe just more of that quiet snoring, but actually Eddie laughs breathily and tells him, “You’re underestimating how much I missed you.”

“Why do you think I’m out here?”

Eddie’s eyes are too dark to read in a dark room. “Water.”

Time for an abrupt change of topic. “So if you could have a machine that could help you make exactly what you want for dinner every night, or one that automatically knows exactly what music to play to make you happy, which one would you choose?”

He can sort-of-almost tell Eddie’s grinning. The fact that his expressions are so hard to see without proper illumination should make it  _ easier  _ to stop stalling for no good reason. And yet.

“Where’s this coming from?”

“I’ve had months to come up with this shit, Eds. I’m a walking conversation starter card deck. Cut out the middleman.”

Eddie takes a satisfyingly long time to mull it over. “Maybe the music one.  _ I  _ don’t even know exactly – wait, are we assuming it knows basically everything? Not just what I know?”

“You’re really testing my resolve not to make fun of you, here,” Richie laughs. “Let’s go with… yes,  _ and  _ it has a better algorithm than Spotify.”

Eddie’s getting into it now, drumming his fingers absently against his knee. “Privacy concerns?”

“Zilch. It’s magic so it doesn’t need internet.”

Eddie nods, satisfied with his choice. “What about you?”

“Oh, I’d cheat the system. We each pick a different one so we get the best of both worlds.”

“Seems kinda unfair for these hypothetical machines to work for anyone who happens to use them.”

Richie hugs one knee against his chest and hopes it doesn’t ruin his confident-and-casual impression. “Alright, granted, but I’d still get the food one.”

Apparently Eddie either forgot or hasn’t realized just how blind Richie is, because it’s several moments into him giving Richie a look that probably wouldn’t be indecipherable to anyone else when he clears his throat awkwardly and asks, “Okay, why?”

“I’m pinning my hopes on you having good taste that I just don’t know about yet.” He focuses very hard on ensuring that nothing about his voice changes even slightly when he adds, “And ‘cause if you enjoyed it, I’d enjoy you enjoying it.”

_ Jeez, that was so redundant, did it even make sense? _

Eddie freezes for an instant while Richie runs back over the sentence again and again in his mind, until the words stop meaning anything at all and Eddie says, “Rich, you  _ do  _ know how I feel, right?”

“About…” Richie begins, fully intending to play dumb.  _ About the dearth of proper garbage disposal in this city? Shutter shades? Ty’s more recent attempts at “cute” stuffed animals? _

He changes his mind and shuts his mouth. When he finally works up the nerve to say, “Us,” it comes out in unison with Eddie’s quiet “you.”

“Yeah, what you said,” Richie says. “Yeah.”

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Eddie hastens to add. He’s stiff as a board and breathing kind of funny. “We can stick to your conversation starters or whatever.”

Richie fidgets. He can’t decide if he should get up, lean in, give Eddie some space. At least he knows Eddie is only trying to give him an out, not use one for himself, and that’s encouraging. It’s a chance to show Eddie that he can be brave, too. 

He says, “The point of a conversation starter is just to start a conversation, right? So, it’s started.”

Eddie looks at him. Richie looks back and doesn’t wait for him to ask.

“You know it drove me crazy not being able to say anything? I never thought I’d be dying to tell  _ that  _ secret.”

Eddie’s big, dark eyes look a little extra shiny. Richie imagines being able to see himself reflected in them as he watches Eddie’s mouth open and close a few times. It’s all alphabet soup until he says, “Were you – can I ask?”

_ Well, yeah, that might even make it easier for me. _

“Were you ever afraid I’d move on?”

Richie answers with another question before he can stop himself, because of  _ course  _ it scared him. He’s been camped out on the shoulder watching everyone else race past him for months, and the only reason he feels alright about it now is he finally has a hand to hold the steering wheel.

He just  _ also  _ feels a little like he’s lost control of the vehicle.

“Did you?”

“I tried,” Eddie offers. He brings a hand up to his face in the dark. “I’m s”—

“No, I – don’t be sorry, I wanted that – or, no – I knew you’d have to.” Richie pulls their blanket a little tighter around himself so he can pick at the seams. “I didn’t think you had any other choice, y’know? ‘Course I didn’t want you all broken up about me forever.”

If Richie still had canine night vision, he’d probably be able to see the white of Eddie’s knuckles blend right into his half of the comforter. “Do I have another choice now?”

_ Yes,  _ Richie wants to say.  _ Anything in the world you want, it’s yours, just please let it still be me,  _ but his throat is so swollen with emotion that he’s afraid he’ll start barking and howling if he lets any noise out at all. After months spent saying all the important things the only way a dog can, it’s so much simpler just to drift away from the couch so he can be face to face with Eddie. He looks as nervous as Richie feels, but when Richie finishes patting around the floor and finally finds Eddie’s hand, Eddie is the one who weaves their fingers together. 

It’s Richie who leans in to kiss him.

And Eddie who stops him pulling away with a low growl, free hand a fist in his shirt. The comforter slides off his shoulders to the floor. There’s a heat in that second kiss that settles low in Richie’s belly, heavy and satisfying like a third square meal. He draws a surprised noise from Eddie with his tongue and stops worrying about what to do with his hands when Eddie tentatively returns the favor. 

“Mmm, just like old times,” Richie says.

Eddie’s response is slightly delayed by his continuing to be busy peppering Richie’s jaw with exploratory kisses. His nose traces a ticklish line along Richie’s cheek. “‘Least human Richie’s tongue is less likely to give me a flesh-eating bacterial infection.”

Richie laughs. They’re still so close it becomes an open-mouthed kiss. Sloppy – Eddie retaliates with one of his own.

“That’s romantic,” Richie says. “You make me sound like a komodo dragon. Took a page right out of  _ The Metamorphosis.” _

Eddie reels him in for a hug. Richie feels a puff of warm breath through the fabric of his shirtsleeve that might be a laugh and might be a yawn. Eventually, Eddie says, “I’m still waiting for you to follow that up with a shitty dick joke about cockroaches.”

“Nothing I can say could possibly be funnier than you asking me to make a dick joke about cockroaches.”

“I’m  _ not  _ asking, I’m resigned to it because it’s inevitable,” Eddie says, and sure enough, Richie’s already cataloguing the possibilities. While he does that, Eddie pauses, then straightens his back with a groan of complaint and says, “Can we move this upstairs?”

Richie’s train of thought derails on “this” until he remembers that they can do better than a couch that, while deep, is far from deep enough to accommodate two grown men. It still takes him an embarrassingly long time to suggest, “How about down the hall?”

“Yes,” Eddie says immediately, before his own brain catches up and he goes from standing up to collapsing back onto the couch. The sheet he so carefully tucked around the cushions has come loose, leaving a section of couch exposed to the ravages of human skin cells and sweat and all the other little things Eddie worries about. “You wanna share?”

“Is that okay?” Richie worries. “We can trade. I can”—

“It’s okay, Rich.” Eddie’s tone is as gentle as he is, helping Richie to his feet and watching him stretch the ache from his joints with both hands still lingering just above his hips. 

Richie never does get that glass of water.

-*-

Richie wakes up to an empty bed, a warm patch on the sheets beside him that could just be from the sun tilting in through the blinds, and music.

He’d know those hokey lyrics and backup vocals anywhere.

The Eddie Kaspbrak-Buddy Holly duet is new, though. Richie rolls onto his stomach and enjoys what he can hear of the impromptu kitchen concert through the cracked-open bedroom door. Eddie’s singing voice keeps fading into absent humming. The door to the fridge swings open and closed intermittently. An egg cracks against the side of a pan.

_ “Tell me how to keep your love… you know how…” _

Humming in time with him, Richie sneaks into the bathroom to freshen up. Showering is out – too likely to drown out precious seconds of, probably, the best morning of Richie’s life.  _ So far. _

By the time he makes it out to the kitchen, his playlist has cycled through several more syrupy love songs of days gone by. Eddie’s singing along to more Buddy Holly, because, well – it’s topical. 

_ “So doggone easy, doggone easy,”  _ Richie interjects, perfectly flubbing his attempt to hit the high notes the Crickets do. Eddie stops stirring his mystery bowl of ingredients to greet him with a kiss. Richie feels like butter in a hot pan.

“You didn’t tell me about this mix,” Eddie says, even though it’s barely a mix at all, sitting at about fifty percent Buddy Holly hits. Richie can do a lot better, but it started as a private joke that spiraled wildly out of control about five seconds in to quietly perusing the lyrics of “Eddie My Love.” The dog list was a necessary – but fun! – smokescreen.

Judging by the tone of Eddie’s voice and his continued humming, maybe not so necessary after all.

“You’re forgetting the hiccup,” Richie says.  _ “The way you kiss and say goodni-ha-hight…” _

“You’re critiquing my technique? Really?” 

“It’s an integral part of the  _ style,”  _ Richie says. And if he didn’t poke a little fun, being kinda-sorta serenaded by Eddie would reduce him to a puddle on the floor in half the time it takes these old rockers to get through one two-minute song. “And that’s what you get for naming me Buddy.”

Eddie scowls. “It was a cute name.”

“For a cute dog,” Richie agrees.

“I’m gonna miss that face,” Eddie laments, then gives Richie’s cheek a few pats. “Not as much as this one, though. Wanna put those hands to good use?” Richie makes a scandalized face and winks for the warm flush that crawls up the back of Eddie’s neck.  _ Déjà vu. _ “Get over here and help me whisk this so I can get some fruit chopped.”

“No way, I wanna use the knife.”

“Don’t you think you should be able to  _ see  _ the knife if you’re gonna use it?” Eddie crosses the kitchen and pulls a shiny gray blob from the general vicinity of the knife block. Richie grins, shrugs, and turns to Eddie’s bowl of nondescript batter. 

“Pancakes?”

“Waffles,” Eddie says. “Should we put blueberries in them? Or just on top?”

_ “Both.  _ As you know, I  _ love  _ blueberries,” Richie says. That was one of the best snacks available to him as a dog, sweet where sweets were a little harder to come by.

Eddie directs his attention to a whole bowl of them and lets him have at it. The end result of their efforts is two heaping plates of blueberry waffles piled high with apples, berries and bananas on a generous layer of peanut butter and, in Richie’s case, altogether too much syrup. There’s more than enough left over to freeze, even after Richie manages to tuck away an amount of food that’s beginning to approach his usual appetite, to Eddie’s obvious satisfaction.

“Trying to fatten me up, Kaspbrak?”

“Yeah, it’s my evil plan to make you more comfortable to cuddle,” Eddie says with a roll of his eyes and a smile that seriously undermines it.

After the dishes are done and the dishwashing gloves stowed behind the sink faucet, they talk plans for the day. Eddie assumes sightseeing is out for obvious reasons, but Richie assures him he’s more than happy to go out with him – “And nervous! Don’t mind me if I sweat bullets, just trying to get the full human experience.” He doesn’t need to see good weather to enjoy it, and the glasses situation means Eddie will have ample opportunity to get a little extra touchy-feely with him.

Besides, Richie likes being talked  _ to  _ almost as much as he likes talking – except for when it’s Eddie talking to him, in which case he might actually like it  _ more.  _ He’s looking forward to a guided audio tour of NYC’s choicest people-watching.

They eventually settle on an unordered list of possible stops that stretches far beyond a single day’s worth of things: Time’s Square and Central Park (because obviously); the sex museum (Richie’s idea); Madame Tussauds (Eddie’s idea); the Panorama of the City of New York (best saved for when Richie can see well enough to appreciate the details); Top of the Rock (because when you’ve suffered one or more near-death or actual-death experiences in the sewers of New England, going very far above ground is a total cakewalk); about a dozen other museums (“What do you think the fact that it took us this long to name the Met says about us?”); and just about anywhere Richie might be able to pick up a notebook, electronic or paper, that he can use to get cracking on his comeback performance.

(Personally, though, he’s gunning for a flimsy, wide-ruled “I <3 NY” spiral notebook, because what can he say? In just over 24 hours, the city’s already started to grow on him.)

-*-

Richie sits down to the Losers Club’s third reunion dinner-slash-”glad you’re not dead” bash still basking in the glow of attention well-reciprocated. From the moment he set foot inside the restaurant and scored a two-for-one Bill-and-Mike hug, he’s spent a solid majority of his time being touched: hugs, “just making sure you’re really here” pats on the arm, the works.

He even gets a handshake from Patty, who politely introduces herself before amending that greeting with a more familiar smile and, “But I guess you knew that?”

Richie can’t help his surprised, “You believe it?” He looks at Stan. “She knows?”

Stan raises an eyebrow at him.  _ You really think I’m gonna answer  _ for  _ my wife?  _ Or maybe –  _ Of course she knows, Richie, she’s my  _ wife. Richie totally gets that grudge. He’s gonna be making it up to Stan and Eds for ages – and he’s lucky Patty doesn’t seem the least bit offended.

“I believe Stanley,” she says with a decisive look, and then to really cement it, mid-appetizer free-for-all she gets preemptively apologetic and begins, “So, Richard”—

“Please, Richard was my father,” Richie jokes. Beside him, Eddie shakes his head and interjects, “His dad’s name is Went”— _ “Worth,”  _ Richie finishes. “Anyway, you can just call me Richie – technically we already knew each other!”

“Whatever you say, Wentworth Jr,” Eddie teases. Unfair that  _ that’s  _ what nearly causes Mike to choke on part of a mozzarella stick.

“Richie,” Patty agrees. “So – we won’t be seeing Buddy again? At all?”

If Stan weren’t the first to laugh right out of the gate, Richie might’ve thought twice about it. For Bill, Bev,  _ and  _ Mike’s sake, he hopes Eddie or maybe Ben happens to know the Heimlich maneuver.

When Patty starts laughing, too, Stanley asks, “Yeah, Richie, when is Buddy coming to dinner?” 

“I’m not cute enough for you guys?” Richie exclaims, pinching the bridge of his new glasses and clutching melodramatically at his chest. “Stan, your wife thinks I’m less cute than a dog.”

“You  _ are  _ less cute than a dog,” Bev reminds him.

“Oh, yeah!”

Eddie’s hand makes its way to Richie’s knee under the table, which means finally putting a stop to that slow finger-sliding along the rim of his water glass that one-hundred-percent  _ must  _ have been willfully engineered to make Richie’s whole everything as warm as sun-baked sidewalks.

Over  _ dinner.  _ He’s scandalized, really he is.

He answers Eddie’s questioning look with a little nod of his own and waits for everyone to stop talking and laughing long enough for him to give a more serious answer. “No, no, but actually Eds and I have been talking about adopting another dog.”

“A real one this time,” Eddie adds. His smile could light up a whole town. Richie thinks it’s more  _ that _ than his own casual announcement that drives the point home, but just in case – and because Eddie was kind enough to guarantee them the relative privacy of a VIP table when they made a reservation – he slouches into Eddie’s space, makes a grand gesture of tossing a jovial arm around Eddie’s shoulders and a much smaller one of kissing his cheek.

All the while, Eddie sits there looking like the cat that got the canary. Richie’s stomach feels like it’s got a canary  _ in  _ it, but their friends’ reactions are quiet. Not uncomfortable quiet,  _ obviously; _ if Eddie’s smile could be rivaled by anything on the planet, it’d be rivaled by the unbroken line of buoyant grins and surprised almost-laughs right here at this table. 

“Congratulations, you two,” Stan says, meeting Richie’s eyes to give him a smile that  _ seems  _ to threaten future teasing. Maybe he’s just sore because it’s hard to give the “you be good to him or else” speech to your close friend’s boyfriend when said boyfriend also happens to be your close friend.

“Does this call for another round of drinks?” Ben wonders.

Bev cheers. “Can’t toast without drinks!”

While they order on behalf of the rest of the table, Mike turns curious eyes on Richie and Eddie and gets right down to the real business.

“A dog, huh?”

“Yeah, I’m connected to them, like, metaphysically,” Richie boasts, already shaking his head as he does.  _ Are you hearing this guy?  _ Mike looks briefly disappointed, but then Bill quietly asks if they can assume this is why Richie oh-so-smoothly inquired as to whether they were planning to let any metaphorical cats out of any metaphorical bags, themselves.

It’s Eddie’s turn to look surprised. Richie grins. “Didn’t wanna steal anyone’s thunder.”

_ And  _ he’d been dying to apologize directly for interrupting them the other night. He’d been curious, too, but he never would have asked if Bill hadn’t chosen to explain sans prompting.

Turns out it’s this whole thing. Seeing other people was Audra’s idea. Seeing Mike was no one’s idea. It just happened, and according to Mike, they haven’t put a name to it yet, which makes explaining it difficult.

They try, anyway, and as everyone gets drawn back into the conversation, the topic changes and changes again. Richie has to answer a whole slew of questions about life as a dog, which turns into scattered improv that might just give him more to work with come his first show in ages. His friends are biased – though whether that’s in his favor or against it, who can  _ really _ say – but there can be no doubt about the volume level coming out of their corner of the building. They’re a nuisance. A cacophonous, barked-laughter, plate-clattering nuisance, four-for-four tangled up in each other like – what’s the saying? The tail wagging the dog?

Richie wouldn’t have it any other way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Lyrics referenced in this chapter were, of course, "Quiche Lorraine" by the B-52's and "Rave On," "Tell Me How," and "It's So Easy" by Buddy Holly.


End file.
